How we list shops

A shop appears on a city page only if it holds an active state retail license: a California Department of Cannabis Control (DCC) retailer or microbusiness license, a New York Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) adult-use dispensary license, including CAURD licenses, or a retail store license on the Nevada Cannabis Compliance Board's (CCB) List of Licensees. Before we list a shop we check the license number, its status, and the premises address in the regulator's public data, and we check the shop's own website shows it open to customers.

Where a city also requires its own registration, the shop must be on the city's published list too. San Jose is one: its code says no cannabis business may operate without the city's registration (SJMC 6.88.330 A), so a San Jose shop is listed only once it appears on the city's list of registered cannabis businesses. The San Jose page also names every licensed address it does not list yet and says why.

Every city page lists at least three licensed shops, including shops that pay nothing. A city page that falls below three is marked noindex until it has three again.

• License number, status, and premises address: the DCC, OCM or CCB public license data.
• Phone, hours, and website: the shop's own website or a listing the shop controls. A regulator's business phone is often an owner or office line, so we never use it as the storefront number.
• Anything we cannot confirm is shown as “Not verified yet” instead of a guess.
• Each profile shows the date we last checked it against the regulator.
• Every week an automated check looks up each listed shop's license with the regulator, and another follows every outbound link on the site. A lapsed license or a source page that has disappeared is flagged for us to fix.
• City pages show the date of that weekly check as “Licenses checked”. The date moves only when every listed license in the state came back active, so it never vouches for a lapsed one.

No listed shop pays us today. If a licensed shop pays for a richer profile in future, it will carry a visible PAID PARTNER label, and its website and menu links will use rel="sponsored". Payment never changes which shops we list or their order: every city list runs A to Z by trading name, ignoring "The". A paying shop is verified the same way as every other shop.

We publish a ranked “best of” list only when it states its criteria in public, includes at least three licensed shops, and includes at least one shop that does not pay us. A page that only names the paying shop is an ad, and we will not publish it.

Every purchase limit, age rule, tax, and consumption rule on the site is summarized from a statute, a regulation, or the regulator's own page, and the page cites it. We do not estimate or round a legal number. Rules change, so each page shows the date it was last reviewed.

• Weather: NOAA 1991–2020 climate normals for the nearest official station.
• Events: only events whose official page states the date and place. Past events drop off the site automatically, and recurring events without announced dates say so.
• History and culture: public records, reputable newspapers, and museums or archives, each linked from the page.
• Photos: city and guide photos come from Wikimedia Commons under licenses that allow reuse with credit (Creative Commons or public domain). The photographer, the license and a link to the original file sit under each photo. We resize them and change nothing else. No photo shows a shop or suggests a shop endorses us.

• Medical claims or dosing advice.
• Prices, deals, or coupons.
• Unlicensed shops.
• Tips for using cannabis where the law does not allow it.

If something on a page is wrong, email desk@cannabiscityguides.com with the page URL and a source (the regulator record or the shop's own website). We check it against the source and update the page and its date.