Terms of Service

Effective: August 29, 2026. These terms govern use of whoreallyowns.org and whoreallyowns.com (“the site”).

What this site is

The site is a public-interest directory reporting who owns US local businesses, compiled from public records with a citation for every claim. It is provided as-is, for informational purposes. It is not legal, financial or investment advice, and while every claim carries a citation, we do not warrant that any entry is complete, current or error-free. Ownership changes; sources lag. Verify against the cited sources before relying on any entry.

Data license

The compiled directory content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0): you may share and adapt entries, including commercially, provided you attribute “whoreallyowns.org” with a link to the relevant page. The underlying facts are public records; the license covers this compilation and presentation.

Acceptable use

• No bulk extraction. Automated scraping, harvesting or systematic downloading of the directory or its underlying API beyond reasonable individual lookups is prohibited. If you want the dataset, contact us instead of scraping.
• Do not misrepresent the site's claims, remove citations from reused entries, or present entries as asserting more than they say (in particular: “no known corporate owner” is not an assertion of independence).
• Search-engine crawlers honoring robots.txt are welcome.

Corrections and takedowns

If you represent a listed business or owner and believe an entry is wrong, the citations on the entry show the sources behind it. Corrections are made when the evidence supports them.

Changes

These terms may be updated; the effective date above changes when they are.