Transparent, accountable trust ratings for news

Our trained journalists have rated and reviewed all the news sources that account for 95% of online engagement.

Each site is rated using nine basic, apolitical criteria of journalistic practice. Based on the nine criteria, each site gets a trust score of 0-100 points and a detailed “Nutrition Label” review explaining who is behind the site, what kind of content it publishes, and why it received its rating — with specific examples of any trust issues our team found.

NewsGuard data helps individuals, governments, companies, and organizations fight misinformation and teach media literacy through data integrations and other partnerships.

Robust data on news source reliability—updated continuously.

For each site rated, NewsGuard provides more than 30 distinct categories of descriptive metadata, including a breakdown of the site’s assessment on NewsGuard’s nine criteria, an indication of its political slant, descriptions of the topics—or types of misinformation—it covers, and more. Ratings are updated continuously as sites change ownership or adopt new editorial practices.

A transparent, accountable rating process

NewsGuard’s rating process is designed to be transparent and journalistic in every sense.

• Rigorous. Each rating goes through a multi-step drafting and editing process during which it is reviewed by multiple analysts and editors, including a full-staff panel review before publication.
• Accountable. Every rating issued is accompanied by a Nutrition Label listing the names and backgrounds of everyone who worked on writing or editing it.
• Transparent. Every NewsGuard Nutrition Label explains the rationale behind the rating in detail–including examples and citations backing up our conclusions.
• Fair. Before we publish a rating, we contact the publisher to inform them of any NewsGuard criteria the site may fail to meet. Publishers may address any issues we have identified, dispute their rating, or provide comments to be included in our Nutrition Label.

Extensive coverage and real-time misinformation warnings

NewsGuard’s ratings cover all of the news and information websites that account for 95% of online engagement with news in the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Germany, and Italy. Our team of analysts monitors and continually updates our ratings for each site in the dataset—while our rapid response team tracks emerging misinformation narratives and sources to provide real-time coverage as misinformation sources spin up new domains, shift web addresses, or begin trending with an emerging false narrative.

White Paper: Research Backing NewsGuard’s Reliability Ratings

This white paper summarizes research into misinformation’s impact and potential solutions, illustrating how NewsGuard offers an effective approach backed by research. The paper also describes research projects that have been conducted using NewsGuard data.