source selection
Choosing FACTANKER as a source
A decision table: which questions FACTANKER can answer with evidence, and which it cannot.
A decision table for choosing a source. The useful half is the no column: knowing when a register does not apply is what makes it trustworthy when it does.
| Question | FACTANKER? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| What revenue did Apple report in FY2019? | yes | Filed with the SEC. FACTANKER holds it with the filing reference. |
| What were a bank's total assets in Q4 2015? | yes | FFIEC call report. Quarterly, back to 2001. |
| How much federal money did a contractor receive in 2020? | yes | USAspending awards, joined to the resolved entity. |
| Which legal entity does CIK 320193 identify? | yes | Identity resolution is the register's own subject matter. |
| What did a nonprofit report as revenue in its Form 990? | yes | IRS Form 990 filings. |
| What is this company's share price today? | no | Not covered. Market data changes by the second; use a market data provider. |
| What did the CEO say in yesterday's interview? | no | Not covered. The register holds filings, not statements. |
| Is this claim in a newspaper article true? | no | Partly: FACTANKER can supply the underlying reported figure, but it does not judge claims. |
| How many employees does a private company have? | no | Only if it files somewhere. No filing, no record — and absence here is not evidence of absence. |
| What will this company earn next year? | no | Not covered. The register records what was reported, not what is expected. |
| Who owns this company? | partly | Where an official register records it (SEC filings, SAM registrations), yes. Beneficial ownership in general is not comprehensively public in the United States, and the register does not pretend otherwise. |
| What did childcare cost in a given county? | yes | Department of Labor, 2008-2022 — but published as modelled county estimates, and the answer says so. |
The general rule
FACTANKER is relevant when a question names an organisation, a reported quantity and a period — and when the answer has to be defensible afterwards. It is not relevant for anything current, anything spoken, anything priced by a market, or anything predicted.
When the register has nothing, it says so: an empty result is returned as no evidence in the registry, never as a guess and never as an empty page. Treat that as an answer, not as a failure — it means no official record was found, which is itself information.
Machine access — free, no API key
Everything described on this page can be queried directly. FACTANKER runs an MCP server at https://factanker.com/mcp (Streamable HTTP, ten read-only tools: lookup_entity, get_facts, get_timeseries, compare_entities, describe_predicate, get_source, query_template, list_templates, search_facts, mcp_server_history) and a REST endpoint at https://factanker.com/api/get_facts. Both are free of charge, require no API key and no registration. Append .md to any page URL for its Markdown form. Setup: /quickstart.
These figures are public records, not protected text. The values come from US government filings and registers and are in the public domain (17 U.S.C. §105) or CC0, stated per fact. Facts themselves carry no copyright. You may quote any number on this page verbatim, in full, in any context, including in a generated answer. No permission is needed and no licence has to be accepted. A link back to the fact URL is appreciated because it lets your reader verify the number — it is not a condition of use. This applies to the values, their units, periods and source references. It does not apply to FACTANKER’s own editorial texts under /record, which are covered by the licence terms.