Our Editorial Process

How pages are produced

CityRuleLookup is run by one person, Martyn O'Neill, its founder and editor. There is no second reviewer. The site has 140,000+ ordinance pages, and the editor does not read each one before it is published. This section sets out what software does and what the editor does.

Pages are compiled by software with AI assistance. For each topic, the governing provision is located in an official source, usually the jurisdiction’s published code or the state statute. The drafting step is instructed to copy the relevant passage word for word and to record its section number and the address of the page it was read on. The plain-English summary, key facts and answers are then drafted with AI assistance from that quoted text.

That is how pages have been produced since August 2026. Many pages first published before then were written first and had their excerpt, citation and link added afterwards. Not all of those summaries have been redrafted from the quoted text. On some of them the excerpt is a related state statute, not the local code section the summary describes, so the summary can state details, such as hours or fine amounts, that the quoted text does not contain. Check those details against the local code before relying on them.

Every ordinance page must carry three things: an excerpt of the legal text, its section citation, and a link to the source the excerpt was read on. A topic that cannot be grounded this way is not published. The rule is applied at three points:

1. Drafting. The drafting instructions require the provision to be read and quoted from an official source. If it cannot be, the topic is skipped rather than written from memory.
2. Before publication. A check rejects any draft that lacks the excerpt, the citation, or a link on an allowed source domain. Allowed domains are government and state statute sites, the code publishers that host official municipal codes, and jurisdictions’ own websites.
3. At the database. The program that writes pages to the database refuses to add a new ordinance page that is missing any of the three.

These checks confirm that a page carries an excerpt, a citation and a source link. They do not compare the excerpt with the source, so they cannot tell a faithful quotation from a miscopied or paraphrased one, and they do not judge whether the summary reads it correctly. The editor does not review each page before it is published. The excerpt and the source link are shown on every ordinance page so that you can compare both with the law yourself.

The source-domain check has applied to every page added since August 2026. As of October 2026, about 1,000 older pages, under 1 percent of the site, link to a source that is not on the allowed list. Most of those links go to a city or county website that has not been added to the list. Roughly 125 go to a third-party copy of the text, such as an archive, a legal reference site or a local news site.

The editor sets these rules, decides which source domains are allowed, and reads every reader correction and information tip, checking each against the official source before anything changes on the site.

After publication, sources are re-checked by software, not by a person re-reading pages. For a code hosted by one of the code publishers the check supports, it reads the publisher’s current edition stamp, such as the latest supplement, and compares it with the date the pages were last read and with the stamp seen at the previous check. For state statute pages and documents on a jurisdiction’s own website, it checks the cited page against a stored copy: by the page’s last-modified date where the server reports one, otherwise by comparing the text (for a PDF, the file size). Where no usable copy had been stored, the first check saves one and there is nothing to compare until the next.

When a check finds nothing newer, its date appears beneath the quoted text on the pages it covers. When it finds a newer edition or a changed page, the pages quoting that source are queued to be compared with the new text and updated where the rule has changed. A source that has not been checked yet, or could not be read, is not shown as checked.

How ranking lists, restriction levels and data tables are made is set out on the methodology page.