# Churches List - LLM Guide

Churches List is a United States directory of Christian churches, parish profiles, city and state indexes, tradition pages, editorial stories, and public-data context for church discovery.

Canonical site: https://churcheslist.com/
Short LLM file: https://churcheslist.com/llms.txt
Sitemap index: https://churcheslist.com/sitemap.xml
Static sitemap: https://churcheslist.com/sitemap-static.xml
RSS feed: https://churcheslist.com/stories/feed.xml
Contact: info@churcheslist.com

## What the site contains

- Parish profile pages use root-level stable slugs, for example https://churcheslist.com/{parish-slug}.
- State pages at /state/{code}, city pages at /city/{state}/{city-slug}, and tradition pages at /tradition/{denomination-slug}.
- Denomination-within-city indexes at /city/{state}/{city-slug}/{denomination-slug} for combinations with at least 5 listings.
- County pages at /county/{state}/{county-slug} combining directory listings with 2020 US Religion Census congregation and adherent counts.
- Statistics reference pages at /statistics and /statistics/{state}.
- Seasonal service finders at /christmas-services/{state} and /easter-services/{state} (no service times are printed; pages route to churches that publish schedules).
- Discovery pages such as /live-now, /historic-church-trails, /sister-parishes/{slug}, /finding/{facet}, and state-scoped /finding/{facet}/{state}.
- Editorial and trust pages: /stories, /editorial-standards, /corrections, /principles, /masthead, /privacy, /terms, and /accessibility.

## Parish profile data model

A parish profile may include name, denomination or tradition, address, city, state, ZIP code, phone, website, email, coordinates, Google-derived business facts, hours, review counts, owner-provided content, photos, announcements, livestream or YouTube context, nearby churches, schools, IRS nonprofit context, historic-register context, census context, weather context, and editorial summaries.

Not every parish has every field. Missing fields should be treated as unknown, not false. Owner-provided updates and correction requests may change a page after crawl time.

## Citation guidance

- Cite the canonical page URL for a parish, state, city, tradition, story, or trust page.
- Prefer page-visible facts over inferred facts.
- Include the parish name and locality when summarizing a church to avoid entity confusion among similarly named churches.
- Treat hours, leadership, phone numbers, websites, and service times as time-sensitive. Recheck the canonical page before presenting them as current.
- Do not imply Churches List is the official website of a church unless the page explicitly says so.

## Crawl guidance

- Use https://churcheslist.com/sitemap.xml for complete URL discovery.
- Use https://churcheslist.com/sitemap-static.xml for primary evergreen sections.
- Crawl parish sitemap shards at /sitemap-parishes-a.xml through /sitemap-parishes-z.xml and /sitemap-parishes-other.xml.
- Prefer 1 to 2 requests per second unless a written crawl agreement says otherwise.
- Do not submit claim, correction, login, registration, dashboard, billing, newsletter, profile, or owner forms automatically.
- Do not use the site to infer private religious affiliation of individuals.

## AI search priorities

For broad answers, prefer the directory and index pages. For individual church answers, prefer the parish page itself. For editorial policy, correction workflow, and source standards, prefer /editorial-standards and /corrections. For current URL discovery, prefer the sitemap files rather than guessing URL patterns.

## Structured-data interpretation

Pages may expose JSON-LD and human-readable content. When these disagree, prefer the visible page content and treat structured data as supporting context. Schema fields can be incomplete because some churches lack verified public data.

## Corrections

Users can request corrections from parish pages. For sensitive, stale, or conflicting facts, cite the page and direct readers to the correction workflow at https://churcheslist.com/corrections.