Source Methodology

A public claim about what an agency requires, what a status means, or what a step involves must be traceable to a specific official page. If we cannot point at that page, we do not publish the claim — we say the position is unclear, or we leave it out.

This is a sourcing standard, not a legal one. Nothing here means a claim applies to your case, and no source we cite makes anyone eligible, complete, or approved. Only the deciding agency or officer can do that.

A source qualifies when it is published by the agency that administers the step, is publicly reachable at a stable URL, and states the requirement directly rather than describing someone else’s reading of it. We prefer the narrowest page that actually says the thing.

• Primary agency guidanceuscis.gov, egov.uscis.gov, travel.state.gov, state.gov, ceac.state.govThe default authority for any process step, requirement, form edition, fee, or status meaning.
• Governing ruleecfr.gov, federalregister.govUsed only where agency guidance is silent or not specific enough, and cited alongside the guidance it fills in.
• Post-specific instructionsThe embassy or consulate page for the post handling the caseUsed for what that post itself requires. Never generalized to other posts.
• ObservationsWhat couples and attorneys tell us happenedRecorded and labelled as observations. Never promoted into an official requirement, and never used to contradict a primary source.

Law-firm marketing pages, forums, community sites, aggregator articles, search snippets, and a language model’s recollection are not sources for an official requirement, at any tier. They may be useful reading; they are not authority.

Before a process claim is published, it goes through the same four checks:

1. Attribution. The claim is attached to one or more registered sources. An unattached process claim does not ship.
2. Read-back. A person opens each cited page and confirms it still supports the sentence as written — not the topic, the sentence.
3. Scope. Anything post-specific, conditional, or dependent on a couple’s answers is labelled as such rather than written as a universal rule.
4. Language. Wording that would imply eligibility, sufficiency, completeness, approval, or timing is removed, including where the underlying source is correct.

AI assists with drafting and structure. It is never the authority for a fact, and no AI-produced statement is published without a person checking it against the cited pages. See our editorial standards for the review and AI disclosure in full.

Cited pages are not left as links in prose. Each one is a record in a source registry, and the guides that depend on it reference that record. For every source we keep:

• Canonical URLThe exact page a claim rests on, not a search result or a summary of it.
• Publisher and agencyWho is accountable for the statement.
• Page title and categorySo a moved or renamed page is recognizable as the same source.
• Effective or edition dateForm editions and fee schedules are only true for a period.
• Last successful verificationThe date a retrieval confirmed the page still says what we cite.
• Retrieval state and failure countA source we can no longer read is treated as unverified, not as still-true.
• Content hash and accepted snapshotDetects that the page changed, and against which version we last agreed.
• Human review requiredMarks sources whose changes may never be accepted automatically.

Because the registry is the one place a source is defined, a URL that changes is corrected once and every page citing it follows. Source links shown to you come from those records rather than being typed into each page separately.

Figures that move — processing times, Visa Bulletin dates, fees, form editions, interview scheduling windows, and post-specific rules — are read from their source and shown with the date they were read. We do not freeze them into our own text.

Sources are re-checked on a cadence set per source, and a comparison against the version we last accepted tells us whether the page changed.

• Unchanged: the verification date advances. Nothing else moves.
• Changed: the change is recorded against the source, and every page that cites it is flagged for a person to re-read. Sources marked as requiring human review can never be accepted automatically.
• Unreachable: repeated retrieval failures mark the source unverified. An unverified source is never treated as still-confirmed just because it used to be.
• Overdue: a page that passes its review interval, or that depends on a flagged source, is taken out of search results until someone re-reads it. We would rather publish fewer pages than stale ones.

Official sources do sometimes disagree with each other. We resolve it in this order:

1. The more specific authority wins for its own scope: a post’s own instructions govern that post; national guidance governs everything else.
2. The more recent official statement wins over an older one from the same publisher, using the effective or edition date rather than the page’s appearance.
3. Where agency guidance and the governing rule genuinely differ, we present both and say they differ. We do not pick a winner or reason our way to one — that reading is exactly what a qualified attorney is for.
4. Where the conflict cannot be described safely and briefly, the claim comes down until it can.

An observation from a couple, an attorney relay, or a support conversation never resolves a conflict between official sources. At most it tells us to go look again.

• It does not make a statement legal advice, or a substitute for an attorney.
• It does not predict outcomes, approval likelihood, or timing, and it never states that a case has everything it needs.
• It does not guarantee a source was accurate at the moment you read our page — only that a person checked it on the date shown, and that we act when it changes.
• It does not cover the private contents of your case. Those are encrypted on your devices and are not something we can read or source-check.

If a citation is wrong, out of date, or does not support the sentence it sits under, tell us and we will fix it. Every guide carries a correction link, or write to support@togetherward.app or use the support page. Our corrections policy describes what we do next, and you can see what we have published in the guide library.