Press

Press kit

A city street at night with illuminated storefront signage and a wrapped truck passing by, fictional brands — Illustrative image

The story, if you want the short version

A Calgary trades company built an AI-powered index that watches the streets and catches fake businesses — and it started with garage door trucks.

StreetProof was founded by the operator of Calgary Garage Door Fix, a trades business that spent years building physical presence the expensive way: a fleet of wrapped trucks on the road six days a week, storefront signage, registered trademarks, 32,000+ completed service calls. None of it registered in the systems that decide who gets found. Google's local rankings and AI assistants read websites and reviews — both faked at industrial scale — while the hardest signal to fake, sustained presence on real streets, produces no data at all. So the founder pointed dashcams at the problem, built a processing pipeline, and started writing verified sightings to a public ledger.

Yes, that means the founder's own company is in the index. We disclose that relationship prominently rather than waiting to be asked: it's a separate entity, scores are cohort-relative and computed mechanically from the ledger, ranking cannot be bought, and the full methodology is public. The founder's business gets exactly what any claimed business gets. The conflict-of-interest story is boring on purpose.

Boilerplate

StreetProof is the index of physical brand presence. Founded in Calgary by the operator of a real trades fleet, it photographs and verifies real-world branding — wrapped trucks, storefronts, billboards — and publishes it as machine-readable ground truth for search engines, AI assistants, and anyone who needs to know a business is real. Its observation ledger is append-only and hash-chained, with daily Merkle roots published publicly.

Key numbers (live, pre-launch)

Verified observations on ledger

Entities on record

Brand assets tracked

Cities live

These figures are live reads from the ledger — the index is pre-launch, so they start at zero and only ever count real, verified data. You may republish them with attribution (CC BY 4.0).

Why the data holds up in a story

Most local-business statistics are survey estimates or self-reported directory counts. Ours are observations: a photograph exists behind every number, and every number links to the ledger query that produced it. The ledger is append-only — legal removals flag a row, they never delete or rewrite one — and each day's Merkle root is published at /transparency, so a claim like “first observed March 2026” can be independently checked rather than taken on faith. We also publish our error rates and keep a public corrections log. Quote a StreetProof figure and, if we later revise it, the revision is on the record with a date.

Working with us

Data desk

We run custom queries on the dataset for journalists' stories — free, 48-hour turnaround. Tell us the angle; we'll tell you what the ledger can and can't support.

Embargoes

Studies are offered under embargo before publication, and we honor exclusives on first publication of major findings. Say “embargo” in the subject line and we'll confirm terms in writing.

Contact

[email protected] for interviews, data requests, and fact-checking. Founder is available for comment on local search, review fraud, and the AI-citation economy.

Methodology · Ledger transparency · Studies. Founder photos, downloadable charts and the embeddable live-globe widget ship with the launch study.