Verification methodology
Embassy Atlas is an independent directory that expands verified coverage country by country. We are not affiliated with any government, embassy, consulate or diplomatic mission. Official institutions remain authoritative for appointments, travel, documents and consular decisions.
Coverage and the host-country registry
Every available location begins in a host-country registry. A registry entry identifies the country, locale, supported representation types, official diplomatic-list source and review date. A host is not exposed as available until that entry is deliberately published and its eligible records pass the shared evidence, freshness and validation rules.
Shared official-source hierarchy
The same official-source hierarchy applies to every host country:
- The host country’s official diplomatic list or foreign-affairs authority establishes that the representation belongs in the reviewed set.
- An official mission website is preferred for current addresses, contacts, opening hours, appointments and emergency guidance.
- The represented country’s foreign ministry is used when it publishes the mission’s official details or the mission website is incomplete.
Commercial directories and community-edited pages may identify something to investigate, but they are not evidence for published contact details.
The five verification statuses
verified— required details have current official evidence and no known conflict.partial— the representation and required details are confirmed, but optional information is unavailable or incomplete. Missing fields are omitted rather than guessed.needs_review— official sources conflict or indicate a change that requires investigation.unavailable— a necessary official source cannot currently be checked.archived— the representation has closed, left the defined scope or been replaced.
Only eligible verified and carefully reviewed partial records are published. Records marked needs_review, unavailable or archived do not receive public detail pages or sitemap entries.
Freshness and publication
Published evidence must remain within 30 calendar days of the checked build date. A record that exceeds that threshold must be reviewed again before it can remain verified. Publication also requires a confirmed identity and host, a complete address, official evidence, a meaningful current contact source and bidirectional provenance for every displayed source-backed field.
The visible “Last checked” date records the latest successful review. It is not a promise that a mission cannot change afterward, so confirm time-sensitive details with the official source before acting.
Fail-closed country expansion
New country coverage follows a fail-closed policy: we fail closed whenever the required evidence is incomplete. Extracted candidates remain unpublished until the host is in the registry and each record passes the same evidence, freshness and validation rules. Conflicting, missing or stale information is withheld rather than inferred. Adding a country never makes an unreviewed candidate public automatically.
Corrections
Each embassy page has a correction path. When a contact email is configured, it prepares a message with the embassy name and page URL plus prompts for the incorrect field, corrected value and an official source URL. Until then, it leads to the Contact page.
A correction starts a review; it never changes a published record automatically. If official
sources disagree, we withhold the disputed detail or move the record to needs_review until the
evidence is clear.