How our data works

Everything comes from the California Department of Social Services' Community Care Licensing Division (CCLD), the agency that licenses Adult Residential Facilities:

• CCLD's Transparency API, the same public service behind the state's Care Facility Search: each county's facility list, each facility's record (license status, capacity, licensee, visit and citation totals, complaint outcomes, and any open legal action), and each facility's list of reports.
• CCLD's statewide download file for this facility type: one file listing every facility the state has licensed, with its county and status.
• The inspection and complaint report documents themselves, exactly as CCLD publishes them.

ARFlookup.com keeps its own copy: every county's facility list, every facility's record and report list, and the report documents. A filed report never changes, so each one is saved once and kept. Searches, county pages, and facility pages are all answered from that copy, so a slow or unavailable state site doesn't slow down or break this one. The only time a visit reaches CCLD is for a real facility or report that hasn't been saved yet, and the result is then saved for the next visitor.

Each facility page shows "State record as of" the date its record was last saved, and notes when that record is more than two weeks old.

• Full refresh, weekly on Wednesdays (California time), the day after CCLD's own Tuesday update: every county's list first, then every facility's record and report list, then any new report documents. If CCLD is slow or down, the counties that failed are retried every couple of hours until the refresh finishes, and anything not yet refreshed keeps its previous copy rather than disappearing.
• Daily county-list check. Each morning, every county's facility list is checked again, so newly licensed and newly closed facilities usually show up within a day. The check is skipped on days a weekly refresh is already under way (that refresh re-checks every list itself) and on a new site until its first full refresh finishes.
• New facilities. When the daily check finds a facility that's new, its record and report list are saved right away, so a new facility's record is usually saved within a day of appearing on the state's list; its report documents follow in the weekly refresh.

CCLD's facility search returns at most 250 facilities per query, so a large county such as Los Angeles can't be listed in one search. For those counties, the search's answer is merged with CCLD's statewide download file, which lists every facility; if the file can't be had, a slower sweep of many narrower searches is used instead. A newly fetched county list that's suddenly much smaller than the saved one is treated as a bad answer from the state, and the saved list is kept unless the same smaller list comes back again the next day.

CCLD's report list is a rolling window of roughly five years. When the oldest report drops off, every later one moves up a place, so a report's position alone doesn't identify it. Each report has a document id, which appears both in the list and inside the report itself. A saved report is checked against that id before it's shown, searched, or summarized, and one that no longer matches is fetched again. A newly fetched report is also checked to be a real report, not an error page, before it's saved.

A facility page can summarize its inspection reports with AI, only when a visitor asks for it. The model reads the saved text of the selected reports; the citations it reports are checked against the citations found in the report text directly, and any it missed are added. If any selected report isn't saved yet, no summary is made, rather than a partial one. A finished summary is saved and reused for the same reports.

AI summaries can still misread or leave things out. Every summary links to the original state reports, which are always the authoritative record.

• Snapshot timing. The data is a copy, refreshed weekly (lists daily). Something the state changed since the last refresh, such as a new citation or a status change, won't appear here until the next one.
• The state's own errors. Records are shown as CCLD publishes them. A mistake or a delay in the state's records appears here too.
• Closed facilities aren't listed. Search and county pages cover facilities CCLD lists as licensed, pending, or on probation. Closed facilities' records stay on file with CCLD.
• Health & Safety Code text. The Legislature's site (leginfo) blocks automated requests, so Deficiency Finder's "which section covers this" helper uses the Title 22 regulations CDSS publishes, not the statute's text.

A facility's record can only be corrected at the source: contact CCLD (each facility page lists its licensing office), and the corrected record appears here after the next refresh. For a problem with this site itself, see "Corrections and disputes" on the Terms page. More about who runs the site is on the About page.