Regulatory and compliance research
Teams in finance, legal, pharma and the public sector who must defend a retrieval decision.
The problem
- The question after an answer is not "what did you find" but "what did you miss, and can you show it was not material".
- No amount of ranking quality answers that, because ranking says nothing about what was excluded.
- Reproducing a retrieval decision months later requires knowing what the index held at the time, not what it holds now.
The approach
- from and to bound the crawl-time window, reconstructing the evidence base as it stood at a point in time.
- authority restricted to governmental and educational sources removes an entire category of noise in one parameter.
- why_not explains any specific exclusion — present, removed with a typed reason and replacement, or never admitted.
- assemble_context attaches a reason to every included passage, making the selection itself auditable.
The parameters that matter
| Parameter | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
from / to | the period under review | Reconstructs the evidence base at that time. |
authority[] | gov, edu | Institutional sources only. |
min_independent_sources | 2 | A documented threshold applied uniformly. |
why_not?url= | any challenged document | A substantive answer to "why was this not in scope". |
curl -H "x-api-key: $UNLOB_API_KEY" \
"https://api.unlob.com/search?q=disclosure+requirement&authority[]=gov&from=1735689600&to=1738368000"
curl -H "x-api-key: $UNLOB_API_KEY" \
"https://api.unlob.com/why_not?url=https://example.gov/guidance/2026-04"Where this is not the right tool
- History windows are plan-bounded: 30 days on Free, one year on Build, five years on Scale, and the full index on Archive.
- why_not is a substantive answer, not legal advice. Whether it satisfies a specific obligation is a question for your compliance function.
- Query strings leave your infrastructure. Treat the query itself as disclosed.
Frequently asked questions
Can I reproduce a search from six months ago?
You can reconstruct the evidence base by bounding the crawl-time window, provided your plan reaches that far back. Ranking may differ as the index evolves, so log the returned passage ids at the time.
What should I log for an audit trail?
The query and every filter verbatim, the timestamp bounds, the corroboration threshold, the passage ids returned with their reasons, and the result of any why_not call about a document later raised.
Build it on the free tier
10,000 requests a month, no card. Every parameter above works on every plan.