Editorial Policy

Last updated: 2026-05-25 · By the Roofing Claim Guide Team

Roofing Claim Guide publishes research on roof insurance claims for homeowners. Insurance claim guidance is a high-stakes Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topic — homeowners read our guides to make decisions that can move $10,000 or more on a single claim. That responsibility shapes how we research, write, review, and update every page on this site. This policy documents how the work happens so readers can evaluate the editorial standards behind the guidance.

Editorial Team Structure

Roofing Claim Guide is published by a pseudonymous editorial team operating under a single organizational byline. The team includes researchers responsible for tracking state statutes, DOI bulletins, NAIC complaint data, and carrier rate filings; editors responsible for accuracy, citation integrity, and compliance review; and analysts responsible for maintaining the state-by-state coverage comparisons and claim outcome models.

The pseudonymous byline is a deliberate editorial choice rather than a marketing convention. Three reasons:

Claim guidance is jurisdiction-specific, not personality-specific. A Florida claim guide is shaped by Florida statutes, Florida carrier behavior, and Florida appellate decisions. Attributing it to a named author implies that the author's individual track record matters more than the underlying statutory framework. It does not.
The research is what we stand behind. Every claim guide is sourced, citable, and falsifiable against primary authority. A named byline adds nothing to that audit trail; it only adds a person whose reputation can be weaponized in adverse coverage disputes.
Pseudonymous bylines protect against revenue-side pressure. Editorial team members cannot be individually pressured by contractors, insurers, or law firms whose practices we cover. The work is the work.

We do not publish under fabricated author personas, AI-generated author avatars, generic stock-photo bylines, or fictional credentials. The byline is "Roofing Claim Guide Team" — that's a real organizational entity, not a manufactured persona.

Sourcing Standards

Every fact published on Roofing Claim Guide is traceable to a primary source. The hierarchy of acceptable sources, in descending order of authority:

Primary statutory text. State legislative statutes, regulatory codes, and administrative rules in their current published form. Citations include the specific section number and effective date.
State Department of Insurance bulletins and orders. Bulletins, market conduct examination reports, and commissioner orders published by state insurance regulators. Federal sources include NAIC model laws, NAIC complaint indexes, and CFPB consumer advisories.
Carrier rate filings. Public rate filings, form filings, and rate manual exhibits filed with state insurance regulators. These are public-record sources accessed through the filing state's SERFF database or equivalent.
Industry technical standards. IBHS (Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety) test protocols, NRCA (National Roofing Contractors Association) technical bulletins, UL 2218 test standards, ASTM standards, and HAAG / ITEL adjuster training documentation.
NOAA storm event records. Storm Prediction Center event reports, NCEI storm event databases, and National Weather Service post-event surveys for hail size, storm date, and storm path documentation.
Practitioner interviews with attribution caveats. Licensed public adjusters, property insurance attorneys, and roofing contractors interviewed under professional ethics constraints. Attributed by role and jurisdiction (e.g. "a Texas public adjuster"), not by name unless the source explicitly consents to on-record attribution.

Secondary sources that we explicitly do not treat as authoritative: contractor marketing material, insurer marketing material, AI-generated overviews, syndicated cost calculators with undocumented methodology, agency blogs, and SEO-optimized content farms. We may cite a secondary source descriptively (to document a market narrative or a common misconception) but we do not adopt their numbers without primary verification.

Reform-Date Segmentation

Roof insurance law in the United States has been in a major reform cycle since 2022. Three categories of reform have substantially changed claim outcomes and require careful temporal segmentation in any guidance:

Florida — Senate Bill 2-A (December 2022) and Senate Bill 4-D (May 2022) substantially reformed the property insurance market. SB 2-A banned new Assignment of Benefits agreements, eliminated one-way attorney fees in property insurance disputes, and established the Citizens Property Insurance Corporation depopulation pipeline. SB 4-D mandated the Roof Deductible Provision and the Roof Replacement Cost Schedule.
Texas — House Bill 1422 (2023) limited contractor-induced loss claims and restricted contractor solicitation of insurance claims within a defined post-event window.
Colorado — Senate Bill 22-216 (2022) reformed contractor-matching scheme regulation and tightened insurance fraud prosecution for roof claims involving public adjusters and contractors operating jointly.

Every Roofing Claim Guide page that touches a state with active reform legislation segments its data and guidance by pre-reform and post-reform windows. Claim outcome statistics from the pre-SB-2-A Florida market (when AOB-driven litigation dominated case volume) are not blended with post-SB-2-A statistics. Settlement-pattern data is segmented on the same boundary. Where pre-reform data is referenced for historical context, the page makes the reform window explicit so readers do not apply outdated assumptions to current claims.

AI and Automation Disclosure

Roofing Claim Guide uses AI-assisted research as part of the editorial workflow. We disclose how, because Google's quality guidelines and consumer trust both favor transparency on this point.

Where AI is used. Source synthesis (extracting structured data from primary sources like statutes and DOI bulletins), draft generation from research outlines, structural editing of long-form prose for readability, citation cross-referencing against the source corpus, and competitor content analysis to identify topic gaps.

Where AI is not used without human verification. We do not publish AI-generated statute citations, AI-generated dollar figures, AI-generated carrier behavior claims, or AI-generated case-law references without a human editor verifying each citation against its primary source. We do not publish AI-only content where the human role is limited to headline editing or button-pushing.

Editor accountability. Every published page is reviewed by a human editor who is responsible for accuracy, citation integrity, and compliance. The editor signs off the page before it deploys. If an AI-assisted draft is wrong, the editor is responsible — there is no "the AI hallucinated" defense in our internal review process.

Automation in the build pipeline. Site infrastructure (sitemap generation, URL validation, structured data emission, OG image generation, IndexNow submission, link integrity checking, compliance regex scanning) is fully automated. These are mechanical correctness functions, not editorial functions. Their failures surface in build output and block publication.

Editorial Independence

The Roofing Claim Guide editorial team operates independently from the revenue operation. Revenue is generated through a pay-per-call referral model: when a homeowner calls the phone number on the site, the call routes to a roofing contractor in our network and we earn a referral fee for the connection. The homeowner pays nothing for the call.

Three structural protections separate editorial from revenue:

The editorial team does not have visibility into which specific contractors are in the referral network. Editors cannot favor (or disfavor) network contractors in their writing because they do not know who they are.
Referral revenue is generated on the call connection itself, not on any subsequent contract signing, work performed, or claim outcome. The revenue is structurally insulated from any specific editorial judgment about whether a homeowner should file, hire, or sign.
Editorial team compensation is not tied to referral volume, conversion rate, or any commercial metric. Editors are paid for research, writing, and review on a schedule that does not incentivize favorable coverage.

We do not accept payment, gifts, sponsorship, promotional consideration, payment-in-kind, comped services, or any other form of value from roofing contractors, public adjusters, attorneys, insurance carriers, restoration firms, or industry trade associations in exchange for coverage, mention, link placement, or modification of guidance. We do not run banner advertising, retargeting pixels, programmatic ad networks, affiliate links to insurance products, or sponsored content of any kind. We do not sell reader contact information.

Conflict of Interest

Editorial team members and contributors are subject to the following conflict-of-interest constraints:

No equity ownership in publicly traded roofing manufacturers, restoration firms, or property insurance carriers covered by our research. Index funds and broad ETFs are exempted; concentrated positions in covered companies are not.
No current employment with insurance carriers, public adjuster firms, roofing contractors, restoration firms, law firms practicing property insurance, or industry trade associations.
Recent industry employment disclosure required for any team member with relevant industry experience in the preceding three years. Recusal from the relevant coverage area applies for at least one full update cycle.
No family or household financial dependencies on covered industries that would create indirect bias.

Conflict disclosures are made internally on annual cycle and reviewed by an external editorial advisor whose role is solely conflict review. The advisor has no editorial authority over content selection or framing — only authority to flag undisclosed conflicts and require recusal.

Update Cadence

Roof insurance regulation, carrier behavior, and material costs change continuously. We segment update cadence by how fast each content category drifts.

Quarterly review applies to state insurance claim hubs (statute changes, DOI bulletin updates, carrier filing activity), the hail damage roof calculator (deductible defaults, depreciation tables, state-specific rule changes), and the claim process guide.

Semi-annual review applies to roof material cost guides (asphalt shingle, metal, tile, slate) for installed cost ranges, manufacturer pricing, and regional labor rate shifts, and the ACV vs RCV coverage guide (carrier-specific endorsement language changes).

Annual review applies to coverage decision guides (Class 4 impact-resistant shingles, contractor verification methodology) where the underlying technical standards change slowly.

Event-driven updates are triggered immediately when state legislatures enact reform statutes affecting roof claims, when state insurance commissioners issue market conduct orders affecting major carriers, when significant appellate decisions reshape claim litigation patterns, when IBHS or NRCA issue revised technical standards, or when a major storm event surfaces a new claim-handling pattern worth documenting.

Every guide displays a last-updated date. Substantive updates bump the date and are noted in the page footnotes. Cosmetic edits (typography, broken links, minor wording) do not.

Corrections and Reader Feedback

We commit to documented correction within seven business days of receipt for substantive errors. Substantive errors include: incorrect statute citation, wrong dollar figure, misattributed quote, broken regulatory link, outdated reform date, factually incorrect carrier behavior claim, or misapplied case law citation.

Corrections are made by editing the source page (not by back-dating or retroactively rewriting), bumping the last-updated stamp, adding a brief footnote in the page history block, and sending the correcting reader a documented response.

Typographical errors, broken internal links, and minor wording issues are fixed on the next deploy without formal acknowledgment or page-history footnote.

Reader-submitted claim documents (settlement letters, denial correspondence, supplement paperwork) are welcomed as research input. Documents are anonymized (carrier name, claim number, policyholder details, and dollar amounts redacted where appropriate) before any use in our research, and are never shared with contractors, insurers, or third parties. Submit through the contact page.

What We Will Not Publish

The following content types are out of scope by editorial policy and will not appear on this site:

Carrier rankings. "Best property insurance company for roof claims" lists, star ratings of carriers, or comparative scoring of carriers against each other. Carrier behavior is too contextual for a useful ranking and rankings invite manipulation.
Contractor rankings. "Best roofing contractor in [city]" lists, star ratings of named contractors, or sponsored contractor directories. We connect homeowners with local contractors via the phone CTA without naming or ranking them individually in editorial content.
Public adjuster or attorney rankings. Same principle. We discuss the roles in the abstract; we do not name, rank, or recommend individual practitioners.
AggregateRating schema without real review data. The site does not emit Schema.org AggregateRating because we do not operate a verified review platform. Sites that emit fabricated rating schema for SEO are exposed to manual action risk; we do not participate.
AOB lead-generation. We do not collect Assignment of Benefits signups, route homeowners into AOB arrangements, or partner with AOB-driven contractor networks. The pattern is too closely associated with insurance fraud enforcement and consumer harm.
Sponsored content of any kind. No native ads, no sponsored "guides," no advertorials, no paid placements in city directories or cost tables.
Insurance product sales. We do not sell insurance policies, broker insurance products, or partner with insurance affiliate programs. The site is not licensed to sell insurance in any state and does not attempt to.

Legal Disclaimer

The research and guidance published on Roofing Claim Guide is general consumer information. It is not legal advice, coverage advice, or claim-handling advice. We are not attorneys, public adjusters, or insurance professionals; the team's role is to research and document publicly available information about roof insurance claims.

Decisions about whether to file a claim, when to file, how to respond to an adjuster, whether to demand appraisal, whether to execute a pre-suit notice, whether to sign an Assignment of Benefits, or whether to engage litigation should be made with a licensed public adjuster or property insurance attorney in your state. State laws governing these decisions vary and change; this site documents general patterns but cannot account for the specifics of your policy, your loss, your jurisdiction, or your carrier's posture.

The Class 4 impact-resistant shingle discount math, the ACV vs RCV settlement math, the hail damage classification guidance, and the state-specific deadline summaries are illustrative. Actual claim outcomes depend on adjuster inspection findings, policy language including endorsements, carrier-specific scoping practices, and contractor estimate quality. Treat published figures as planning estimates rather than guarantees. If a carrier has issued a written denial, see our guide to responding to a claim denial before deciding the next step.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who writes the content on Roofing Claim Guide?

A pseudonymous editorial team composed of researchers, editors, and analysts focused on roof insurance claim outcomes. The team operates under a single organizational byline rather than individual author names because claim research is collaborative work and the data is what stands behind a guide, not a personal track record. We do not publish under fabricated author personas, AI-generated avatars, or fictional credentials. Where AI-assisted research is part of the workflow, the AI section below documents how.

Do you accept payment from roofing contractors, insurers, or attorneys?

No. The editorial team does not accept payment, gifts, sponsorship, promotional consideration, or any form of payment-in-kind from roofing contractors, public adjusters, attorneys, insurance carriers, restoration firms, or any other party in exchange for coverage, mention, link placement, or modification of guidance. The pay-per-call referral revenue that funds the site is structurally separate from the editorial workflow and does not influence which providers homeowners are connected with.

How do you handle conflicts of interest?

Editorial team members may not own equity in publicly traded roofing contractors, restoration firms, or property insurance carriers we cover. Team members may not have undisclosed current or recent employment with parties whose practices we research (insurance carriers, public adjuster firms, contractor licensing boards). Any prior industry employment is internally documented and recused from the relevant coverage area for at least one full update cycle. This policy is enforced through annual disclosure and is reviewed by an external editorial advisor.

How is AI used in producing your content?

AI-assisted research is used for source synthesis, draft generation, and structural editing. Every published page is reviewed by a human editor against the source materials before publication, and the editor is responsible for accuracy, citation integrity, and compliance. AI is not used to generate cited statute text, DOI bulletin summaries, or claim outcome statistics without human verification against the primary source. We do not publish AI-only content. The full automation-vs-human-review breakdown is documented in our methodology page.

Will you correct errors readers find on the site?

Yes. Substantive errors (incorrect statute citation, wrong dollar threshold, misattributed quote, broken regulatory link, outdated reform date) are corrected within seven business days of receipt with a documented response to the submitter. The corrected page receives an updated last-modified date and a brief footnote in the page history. Typographical errors and broken internal links are fixed on the next deploy without formal acknowledgment. Submit corrections through the contact page.

Why don't you publish best-of-carrier or best-of-contractor rankings?

Carrier and contractor behavior is too contextual for a useful ranking. The same carrier handles a Florida hurricane claim and a Colorado hail claim under entirely different procedural rules; the same national contractor performs differently from one franchise location to another. Beyond the methodological problems, rankings invite manipulation from the revenue side of the business, and we have chosen to remove that surface area entirely. Where we discuss specific carriers or contractors, we do so by reference to documented behavior (reform statute, market conduct examination, state attorney general advisory), not subjective ranking.

For the underlying research methodology, see our research methodology page. For how the site earns money in more detail, see the How We Make Money section of the about page.

Written by the Roofing Claim Guide Team

The Roofing Claim Guide team researches roof decisions across the United States, with focus on insurance claim navigation, storm damage response, and homeowner education. Every guide is independently researched, with no contractor affiliations.