How the checker works

1. Official sources only

Each country has a list of official pages: immigration authorities, visa portals, education ministries, tax authorities, and the government travel advice for UK, US, Canadian, Australian and Irish citizens.

2. Facts only from the page itself

When a page changes, an AI model reads that page's text and extracts specific facts. It must copy a short supporting passage from the page. Our system then checks the passage really appears on the page and that any numbers in the summary appear in it. If not, the fact is shown as "Not confirmed: see official source".

3. Weekly re-checks

Every source is fetched again each week. If the page hasn't changed, its facts are marked as re-confirmed. If it has changed, the facts are extracted again and any update is published with an "Updated on" date and a short note.

4. Staleness warnings

Anything not re-confirmed for 60 days, or whose source is unreachable, is labelled "May be out of date: check the official source".

5. Families can flag changes

Reports from families trigger an immediate re-check of that country's sources, but are never published directly.

Our automated checker

Our fetcher identifies itself as WSHCountryChecker/1.0 and visits each official page about once a week.