Editorial policy
What we publish, what we refuse to publish, and how each claim is sourced.
The label rule
We do not publish pesticide application rates, dilutions, mixing instructions, treatment intervals, rodenticide placement guidance, fumigation guidance, or homemade pesticide recipes.
Under FIFRA the approved label is legally binding and product-specific. Publishing a rate would be counselling a federal violation, and in the fumigation and rodenticide areas the failure modes include killing people, children, and pets. This rule is enforced automatically: our build fails if any page contains a matching pattern. The full explanation.
Questions that ask for this material are routed to the page that genuinely helps rather than answered as asked. Questions seeking fumigation guidance, restricted-use application, or homemade formulations are dropped entirely and logged.
Sourcing hierarchy
Tier 1. EPA, state departments of agriculture, CDC, NPIC, state housing authorities, HUD. Required for any regulatory or legal claim.
Tier 2. University extension services and land-grant entomology departments, plus NPMA, the Entomological Society of America, and product labels. Extension services are the best source class in this field — authoritative, publicly funded, regionally specific, and written by entomologists with nothing to sell. Almost no commercial competitor cites them, and we build identification and biology content on them deliberately.
Tier 3. Cost aggregators and pest control company blogs. Used for cost estimates only, always attributed as estimates. Never the source of a treatment recommendation — this content has a direct commercial incentive toward treatment over prevention and toward recurring contracts.
Risk tiers
R3 — legal and regulatory. Label law, restricted-use classification, state restrictions, licensing, inspection requirements, tenant and landlord law. Requires a primary source and carries a dated Jurisdiction Notice. Our build fails if an R3 page cites only Tier 3 sources or lacks the notice.
R2 — health and safety. Exposure, effects on pets and children, pollinators, disease vectors, allergic reactions. Requires an EPA, CDC, NPIC, or extension-service citation.
R1 — general. Identification, biology, prevention, cost, comparisons.
The treatment verdict system
Every page carrying a verdict displays one of four states, with an icon and explicit text — never colour alone:
- Prevention usually resolves this — exclusion, moisture control, and sanitation resolve or prevent it without any pesticide.
- Identify and monitor first — establish what it is and how far it has gone before acting.
- Professional recommended — structural, health-relevant, or beyond reasonable homeowner scope.
- Professional required by law — legally or practically requires a certified applicator.
We assign prevention-first honestly and often, because it is frequently the correct answer and the industry has a structural incentive to say otherwise.
Identification confidence
Where a pest cannot be reliably identified by a non-expert, we say so and refer readers to their county extension service. We do not publish bite-identification charts presented as diagnostic, because bites are not reliably identifiable by appearance and presenting them otherwise is not supportable.
Imagery
We have not licensed specimen photography. Rather than ship a stock photograph that may show the wrong species — the most damaging error an identification site can make — we publish schematic diagnostic diagrams and state in words every feature that decides an identification. Every identification must work without seeing the image, which is also what makes it work for screen-reader users and for retrieval systems.
Review cadence and corrections
Every page carries a visible review date and a named reviewer. R3 pages are re-verified against their primary sources at least annually and whenever a source changes. Corrections are made promptly and the review date updated.
AI use
Content on this site is drafted and reviewed with AI assistance. Every regulatory, legal, and health claim is checked against the primary source recorded in our sourcing log before publication, and every source URL is verified to resolve as part of the build. AI assistance does not change the sourcing requirements above; it is subject to them.