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Freshness and Trust

Trust comes from source-backed answers, explicit freshness, stable contracts, and enough metadata to keep the trail intact after the data leaves the API.
SEC API publishes the evidence behind freshness, provenance, traceability, and benchmark claims. Freshness is measured from source timestamps and successful API availability, so you can decide whether a response is current enough for your workflow. Factor workflows have additional market-calendar and model-materialization semantics. See Factor Provenance and Factor Freshness for the factor-specific trust contract.

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Measurement policy

1

Source publish time

Use the upstream SEC publish timestamp, such as acceptanceDateTime, as the source-side clock.
2

API availability

Measure the first successful SEC API resolution of the workflow being benchmarked.
3

Normalized availability

Track when the rendered or normalized artifact is ready, not just when a raw fetch succeeds.

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Current trust signals

  • freshness telemetry is measured by form and workflow
  • benchmark validation passes for the current documented workflow suite
  • FinanceBench evaluation: historical benchmark artifacts are documented separately and should be read with their methodology date
  • FIGI-aware company-resolution inputs are available for supported entity-resolution workflows
  • page-level filing traceability is available for filing-derived datapoints, with HTML-first exact fact-region anchors on supported segmented revenue traces
  • non-filing trace records cover SEC enforcement source records, market price snapshots, and analyst estimate datapoints through the same /v1/traces API
  • sentiment endpoints are not currently available

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What makes a response trustworthy

Provenance

If SEC API gives you a structured answer, it should also tell you which filing or source object it came from.

Freshness

If SEC API gives you a current answer, it should also tell you when the source was published and when SEC API last refreshed it.

Materialization

If a parser or normalization pass shaped the output, the version should be visible.

Failure states

If a workflow is stale or degraded, the response should say so instead of pretending nothing is wrong.

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Current health

  • freshness claims use form-level telemetry, not generic real-time language
  • benchmark scorecard: 18 wins, 0 losses, 2 ties on the current suite
  • traceability: filing-derived datapoints can resolve to the correct filing document and page, supported segmented revenue traces can preserve exact HTML fact ranges, SEC enforcement releases expose shared non-filing trace records, and market prices and analyst estimates carry full source-record traces with provider attribution
  • some freshness signals publish warnings when coverage is degraded

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XBRL Facts Coverage

Financial data queries for facts and statements are backed by over 95 million pre-parsed XBRL facts across 9,600+ SEC-registered companies and refreshed daily at 07:00 UTC. Every response includes source metadata in its provenance or completeness object so you can distinguish stored XBRL facts from SEC-served fallback data.

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Evidence used for claims

SEC API trust claims are based on freshness telemetry, external-reference validation, benchmark scorecards, and coverage evidence. Use the metadata in each response to evaluate whether a result fits your workflow.