Keep the context in your truth check

Start with the statement, not the badge

Write down the exact claim being checked. Include the person or organization, date, place, and any qualification that changes its meaning. Similar topics are not necessarily equivalent assertions. A statement about what happened once differs from a claim about what happens routinely.

Search results are discovery aids. Open a candidate review and compare its claim with yours before adopting its conclusion. A snippet can omit the limitation or update that makes the assessment intelligible. Keep the original review linked to the claim it actually examined.

Read Snopes in context

Snopes’ ratings explanation emphasizes that a rating evaluates the wording of a particular claim statement. Preserve that relationship when citing or organizing a published review. Do not apply a familiar rating to a new claim merely because the same subject appears in both.

FactAPI.com is independent of Snopes. We do not claim an official Snopes API, a data partnership, or permission to reproduce its articles. Any integration with a publisher should be based on current documentation and permitted access, not an invented endpoint or an assumption that public reading access allows unrestricted reuse.

Distinguish the rumor from the analysis

A fact-check article may reproduce an assertion in order to challenge it. When extracting passages, record whether the text is the original claim, a quoted source, analysis, a limitation, or the reviewer’s conclusion. An isolated quotation can reverse the article’s meaning if that role is lost.

Follow the explanation behind a rating and identify the underlying material. Check whether the new question concerns the same event, date, and scope. An old review may provide useful background without resolving a later development.

Preserve disagreement and uncertainty

Keep a publisher’s original claim and rating alongside any normalized labels used in your application. Document mappings rather than assuming all rating systems are interchangeable. Your relevance assessment is separate from the publisher’s assessment of its original claim.

When reviews appear to disagree, compare their wording, dates, and sources first. Where evidence genuinely conflicts, describe the unresolved issue. A count of websites is not a substitute for comparing independent support. If no relevant published review is found, treat that as a limitation of the search rather than evidence that the claim is true or false.

Share an evidence trail

A useful review record contains the incoming claim, candidate review, reviewed claim, original rating, dates, key passages, and a limited conclusion about relevance. It should let another person see why the review was used and what it does not establish.

Read the full Snopes and online fact-checking article for the workflow, and the Fact API guide for separating discovery from assessment. Our focus is careful source use, not political persuasion, a universal truth score, or a claim that one publisher’s name settles every question.