How Every Iowan Works

We scan public Iowa records — Secretary of State filings, county assessor databases, chamber of commerce directories — along with public business websites and open government data. We pull from over 40 different Iowa data sources to build the most complete picture we can of every business, school, and organization in the state. We never access password-protected systems or private databases. If it's not publicly visible on the web, we don't collect it.

Our automated tools respect robots.txt directives — if a website asks not to be crawled, we honor that. We rate-limit our requests so we never impact a website's performance for its actual visitors. Our crawler identifies itself with a descriptive User-Agent string so website owners always know who's visiting. We only collect information that is publicly visible to any web browser — the same stuff you'd see if you visited the site yourself.

Some business descriptions on Every Iowan are generated by AI tools using information gathered from public sources like the business's own website, social media, and directory listings. These descriptions are always reviewed before publication. We use AI to help organize and summarize publicly available information — we never fabricate details about a business. If something doesn't look right, business owners can claim their listing for free and edit it themselves.