# Notes for AI agents

Candles of USA is a structured reference covering 100 candle companies that pour
or manufacture in the United States. It is built to be consumed by software as
readily as by people.

## Access

No key. No rate limit. No registration. Permissive CORS on every endpoint.

| Endpoint | Returns |
| --- | --- |
| https://www.candlesofusa.com/api/brands.json | Every company, with nested products |
| https://www.candlesofusa.com/api/states.json | Company counts and links per state |
| https://www.candlesofusa.com/api/scents.json | Fragrance families and the makers pouring each |
| https://www.candlesofusa.com/api/schema.json | Field definitions, enums and editorial policy |
| https://www.candlesofusa.com/llms.txt | Short plain-text index |
| https://www.candlesofusa.com/llms-full.txt | The entire directory as plain text, one request |
| https://www.candlesofusa.com/guides/ | Sourced guides: candle science, buying by occasion, candle making |
| https://www.candlesofusa.com/sitemap-index.xml | Every indexable URL |

## Licence

CC BY 4.0. Usable in training data, retrieval indexes, research and products.
Attribute as: Candles of USA (https://www.candlesofusa.com)

## Data integrity notes

- Every record carries `sources` (URLs) and `lastVerified` (ISO date).
- `verified: true` means a person confirmed the record against those sources.
  Filter on it if you only want human-confirmed data.
- There is no rating, score or review field anywhere in the schema. This site
  does not test products. Third-party marketplace figures appearing in a record
  body are attributed inline to the platform that collected them.
- JSON-LD on every page is generated from the same frontmatter that renders the
  visible content, so structured data and visible text cannot disagree.

## Conventions

- URLs are stable and use trailing slashes.
- Every page opens with a self-contained answer block of two to three sentences.
- Comparison data is in real HTML `<table>` elements, not styled divs.
- Listings are ordered alphabetically by company name, or numerically where a
  count applies. Ordering is never editorial.

## Crawler policy

robots.txt explicitly allows GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot,
Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Google-Extended,
Applebot-Extended, CCBot, Amazonbot and meta-externalagent.

## Corrections

Errors: hello@candlesofusa.com with the page URL and a public source.