The rule this product is built on

LandBenchmark is a satellite land due-diligence service with one editorial rule: everything shown must be explainable as what we observed, how we measured it, and when — with the source linked. If we cannot complete that chain with confidence, we don't show the value. No placeholders, no estimates dressed as measurements, no filling gaps because a blank looks bad.

That rule produces some unusual behavior for a software product. Reports print the word UNMEASURED, with the reason, where other tools would silently omit a row. States that don't publish free ownership data get a plain "no free owner records for this state" instead of quietly purchased broker data. And questions a satellite cannot answer — title, zoning, perc tests, water rights — are routed to a human-verify checklist that names the authority who can, because pretending software settled them would be the most profitable lie available to us.

The Accuracy Ledger is the editorial policy, enforced

Anyone can claim accuracy. We publish ours: the Accuracy Ledger compares our signals against independent authoritative sources and is generated by a script from live checks — nothing on it is typed in by hand, and signals we have never verified are printed as UNMEASURED rather than assumed correct. When a reader shows us a wrong value, the correction process is public: the disagreement is recorded and listed on the ledger, not quietly patched.

How the measurements are made

Every signal's method, source and standards are documented on the methodology page: FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer, USFWS wetlands, USDA soil survey, public digital elevation models, and multi-year satellite imagery, among others — public, authoritative sources a reader can check us against. That is deliberate. A due-diligence tool whose reasoning can't be audited is asking for exactly the trust it should be earning.

Who runs this

LandBenchmark is an independent product, launched in 2026, built and maintained by a small team that answers its own support mail at support@landbenchmark.com. We'd rather be judged by the ledger than by a team page: the product's claim to expertise is that it shows its work and publishes its misses.