What this is
Catholic parish bulletins carry advertisements from local businesses. Those advertisements are scattered across separate weekly PDFs, parish by parish, and are hard to search. Bulletin Businesses turns that public record into a structured directory: which businesses advertised, in which parish's bulletin, and when.
As of this build the index holds 1,338 bulletin issues from 4 parishes, and 18,758 verified appearance records, with 1,723 more detected that do not meet the verification rule. These figures are counted from the records themselves each time the site is built; none is typed in by hand.
Where the data comes from
We use bulletins that parishes, or the companies that publish bulletins for them, have already posted publicly on the web. Parishes use different publishers and hosting arrangements, and we record which one for each issue.
- We do not rehost bulletins. We store structured facts about an issue (parish, date, page, the business name as printed) and link to the original file on the parish's or publisher's website.
- Source links lead to third-party websites that we do not control.
- We do not reproduce advertisements, artwork, or parish logos.
Extraction and matching
Each issue is read by software in three ways. The text embedded in the PDF is used where there is any. Optical character recognition (OCR) is run on pages that are images. And because many advertisements are artwork that OCR cannot read (outlined lettering over a photograph, for example), the advertising pages are also read from the page image by an AI model, which lists every advertisement on the page with the business name and contact details exactly as printed.
Publishers reuse the same advertising page for weeks at a time. We compare page images block by block, and when an issue's advertising page is visually identical to one that has been read, it carries the same advertisements. The record for that issue says which issue's page was actually read.
Software then connects each advertisement to a business using identifiers, in this order: a phone number, a website address, then the business name.
Every match becomes an evidence record that states exactly how it was made: which identifier matched, whether it came from the bulletin's own text or from OCR, and on which page. That description is shown beside every record on a business's source history page.
Bulletin verified: an automated rule
Verification here is done by rule, not by a person reading every advertisement. We say so plainly because the rule is what you are trusting. A business is Bulletin verified when it has at least one qualifying evidence record, and a record qualifies when:
- it is an exact match on a phone number or website address belonging to the business; and
- that same identifier is found for that business in at least 3 issues of that parish's bulletin.
A record also qualifies when the business's advertisement was read from the page image (or the page is identical to one that was), and that has happened in at least 3 issues of that parish's bulletin. The two kinds of record are counted separately towards that threshold; they are never added together to reach it.
There is one exception to the 3-issue threshold. When two independent methods agree on the same issue — the exact phone number or website is found in the bulletin, and the advertisement is separately read from the page image — that single issue qualifies. This is how a business advertising for the first time can be verified the week its ad appears.
Only the advertising pages count. Parishes print the phone numbers and websites of schools, shelters and events in their announcements, and that is not advertising. For every issue we record which pages are its advertising pages, by reading them from the page image. An exact match qualifies only when it sits on one of those pages or the advertisement itself was read there; the same number in a parish announcement never counts, however often it recurs, and an issue whose advertising pages we have not yet identified verifies nothing.
National advertisers. Some advertisers are national companies with no local presence. We read who sold the advertising in each issue from the ad pages' own footer. A national company seen under only one bulletin publisher is usually that publisher filling unsold space, so it is recorded and not listed. One whose ads run under at least 2 different publishers is buying parish advertising itself: it is listed, labelled National advertiser, and kept out of local and category results. The bulletins show that an ad ran; they never show what was paid, and we do not describe anyone as a funder.
The reasoning: an identical ten-digit phone number does not turn up in a parish's bulletin week after week by coincidence. A single occurrence could be a misprint or a shared number, so one-off matches are held back. A match on the business name alone never qualifies automatically, however many times it recurs, because names are ambiguous and also appear outside advertisements.
Records that do not qualify are kept but are not published: the business's page says Detected · not yet verified and shows no dates, counts or parish names.
Bulletin verified is derived from evidence and nothing else. It cannot be purchased, and claiming a listing, submitting a business or sponsoring the directory has no effect on it.
Where people come in: exceptions and audits
People do not approve each business. They do two things:
- Exceptions. Name-only matches, one-off appearances, one phone number claimed by two businesses, and anything a business or reader disputes are looked at by a person, who confirms or rejects the record. Rejected records are kept, marked rejected, and never count.
- Audits. We regularly draw a random sample of automatically verified records and check each against the original bulletin. No audit has been completed yet; the measured error rate will be published here when one has.
If you find an error, tell us. Every source row links to the original bulletin so that anyone can check a claim for themselves.
Current and historical advertisers
A business is a current advertiser at a parish if it has a verified record within 60 days of the most recent issue we have indexed for that parish. Otherwise it is a historical advertiser. We measure from the latest indexed issue rather than from today's date so that a delay in our indexing never makes an active advertiser look lapsed.
Historical relationships are never removed when a business stops advertising. The historical record is the point.
Names as printed
Businesses rename, move and change phone numbers. Each business has a permanent identifier that survives those changes, and each evidence record keeps the name exactly as it was printed in that issue. We do not rewrite old records to match a business's modern name. When two listings turn out to be the same business they are merged, the merge is logged, and every original record is kept.
Catholic owned is a separate question
Advertising in a Catholic parish bulletin shows a commercial relationship with that publication. It does not show that the owner is Catholic, and we never infer it. Where a listing says Catholic owned, it is marked either self-reported (the business says so) or verified (we have confirmed it).
Business-submitted information
Businesses can claim a listing or ask to be added, including businesses that have never appeared in a bulletin. Every submission is reviewed by a person; nothing a business sends us is published automatically. Owners can correct current details such as phone, website, description and hours. Owners cannot add, edit or remove bulletin history, source links, dates or verification status. A business that was submitted rather than found in a bulletin is labelled as such and is not Bulletin verified.
Sponsorship
Businesses may pay for greater visibility. Sponsored placements are always labelled and appear in their own area. Organic results are ordered alphabetically and sponsorship never changes that order, removes a competitor, or alters any record. See sponsorship.
Source links and what happens when they disappear
We periodically check that source links still work and record each link as online, moved, archived or unavailable. If a bulletin is later taken down, the evidence record remains, along with its original address, parish, date and the date we last verified it. The page will say the source is no longer available.
Corrections
If something is wrong, tell us at hello@bulletinbusinesses.com. Factual corrections are free and do not require claiming a listing.
Independence
Bulletin Businesses is independent. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any parish, any diocese, the Catholic Church, or any bulletin publisher. Appearing in a bulletin does not mean a parish endorses a business, and a listing here is not a recommendation or a guarantee of any business's work.