ClerkAPI turns your public municipal website into a resident-service assistant that answers common questions with citations, refuses when unsure, and shows your staff what residents still can't find.
Already crawled & indexed against 47 municipal sites across 12 states — try the live Herndon, VA preview →
Drop this anywhere on your site — your comms team can do it without filing a ticket. No build step, no npm, no framework required.
<!-- Drop into your site's <head> or before </body> --> <script src="https://cdn.clerkapi.com/widget.js" data-city="herndon-va" data-theme="auto"></script> <!-- Or render inline anywhere on the page --> <div id="clerk-assistant"></div>
Most municipal websites are organized the way the city is organized — by department. Residents don't think in departments. They think in tasks. So they call. ClerkAPI sits between the two.
“What day is bulk pickup on my street?”
Buried in a PDF on the Public Works page.
“Do I need a permit to replace a fence?”
Answer is in §4.2 of the zoning code.
“How do I appeal my property assessment?”
Three clicks deep on the Assessor's site.
Retrieval-augmented generation is the easy part. These are the constraints that make it safe to put on a .gov domain.
Every cited claim traces to a real indexed page.
…residential fences up to 6 feet are permitted as-of-right [1] Zoning Code §4.2.
Citations are validated against retrieved chunks before the answer is shown. Unverifiable claims are stripped.
Below the confidence threshold, it refuses.
I don't have a confident answer for that in the current index. For tax appeals, contact the Treasurer's Office at (703) 435-6800.
No fabricated answers. No hallucinated phone numbers. Residents are pointed to a real human when the index can't help.
Every Q&A logged with its sources for staff review.
Staff dashboard shows every question, the answer given, sources cited, and whether the resident clicked through.
Recrawled on schedule, refreshable on demand.
Pushed a new ordinance this morning? Hit refresh, the assistant catches up in minutes — no support ticket needed.
Built to clear procurement review. No surprises in the data flow, no claims we can't back up.
We only index pages reachable from your public homepage. No intranets, no third-party scraping, no APIs without your explicit configuration. Our crawler respects robots.txt and identifies itself in the user-agent string so your IT team can see exactly what touched your site.
The assistant never requests a resident's name, address, account number, or any personal information. Questions and answers are logged anonymously for staff audit. No IPs or session identifiers are retained beyond short rate-limit windows.
Every connection — resident to widget, widget to API, API to database, API to OpenAI and Anthropic — runs over TLS. Indexed content is scoped per customer with strict access controls; only server-side service credentials read or write, and they rotate on demand.
Your indexed pages are your data. Delete on request and your content is removed from our database. We don't train AI models on your content, and the vendors we use for embeddings and generation operate under commercial API terms that exclude API requests from training.
From the moment you paste a URL to a working assistant on your homepage — and a staff dashboard that turns unanswered questions into a content backlog.
We crawl public pages, PDFs, ordinances, and meeting minutes. Nothing private, nothing behind a login.
Semantic search and citation-grounded answers, ready in minutes. Every response links back to a source page.
Embed the resident widget with one script tag — and your staff dashboard goes live the same moment. Every question, every answer, every gap, in one place.
Every question a resident asked. Every answer the site couldn't give. Every gap, ranked. Every Friday, in your town manager's inbox.
Deflected this week: ~324 questions answered without a call or email to staff.
Top unanswered (closing these would deflect ~71 more):
Trending up vs. last week: mosquito spraying schedule (↑ 340%), summer camp registration (↑ 210%).
Compared to 14 similar-population cities · ↑ permits trending
For procurement
Pre-signed DPA, VPAT, subprocessors list, AI disclosure — ready to send to your city attorney.
Annual contracts. No per-seat fees, no per-question metering. Every tier ships with the full procurement pack — DPA, security one-pager, VPAT — included.
For towns under 10,000 residents or a single-department pilot.
For municipalities of 10,000–75,000 residents.
For cities of 75,000–500,000 residents.
Counties, regional COGs, state agencies. Floor: $60,000/yr.
Sized by population, not page count, so you know which tier you're in before the demo. Monthly billing available on Metro and above (+20%). Available under most municipal contracting thresholds; cooperative purchasing in progress.
Everything we get asked on procurement calls, answered plainly.