1. Source verification before display
The registry should confirm each record with the laboratory or pharmacy that issued it before the record is shown. Ask the registry directly: "Do you display records you have not confirmed with the issuer?" The answer should be no. Ours is no — it is the reason our record display is currently paused rather than padded.
2. Named, contactable laboratories
Every record should trace to a named lab with an independent real-world footprint. Records attributed to "third-party testing" with no lab identity are unverifiable by design.
3. Lot-level traceability
Records should be keyed to specific lot numbers so a person holding a product can match it to a record. Product-level "verified" badges without lot linkage verify nothing.
4. No synthetic records
The registry should be able to say how it screens for AI-generated certificates and for real documents scraped from the web and re-attached to other products. Volume is not credibility; a thousand unverified records are worth less than ten confirmed ones.
5. Disclosed methodology
The verification process should be published in enough detail to be criticized — who confirms, what counts as confirmation, what happens on failure. Undisclosed methodology is indistinguishable from no methodology.
6. Corrections and disputes
There should be a stated route for a lab or pharmacy to dispute a record bearing its name, and visible willingness to remove records that fail re-verification.
How this registry measures against its own standard
We publish our source-verification methodology, we key records to lots, we accept submissions issuer-first via the pharmacy intake, disputes reach us at [email protected], and — the uncomfortable one — we display nothing while our verification review is open. We would rather be a small registry of confirmed records than a large registry of PDFs.