STRATAHELM · CAERIHomeCountiesArticlesMethodologyContact

These terms cover stratahelm.com, the free CAERI county reference layer, and StrataHelm subscription services.

Version 1.0 · Effective August 9, 2026 · Applies to: stratahelm.com, the CAERI public county layer, and StrataHelm subscription services

1. Who these terms are between

These terms are an agreement between StrataHelm (“we”, “us”) and you — any visitor to stratahelm.com, anyone who reuses CAERI data, and any organization that subscribes to a StrataHelm product.

Some parts apply to everyone. Sections 8 through 11 apply only to subscription customers and their authorized users. Where a signed order form or written agreement conflicts with these terms, that agreement governs.

2. What the free public layer is, and what it costs

The CAERI county reference layer — every county's score, tier, pillar percentiles, confidence rating, per-county data files, and the national download — is published free and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may share and adapt it, including commercially, with attribution to “StrataHelm CAERI” and a link back. The license page states the full license and citation forms.

We commit to keeping canonical county URLs, the caeri: identifier scheme, the per-county data endpoints, and the license terms permanent, as described in the governance & recalibration policy.

3. What CAERI is — and what it is not

CAERI is a comparative exposure and resilience index. It measures relative standing among U.S. counties on two questions: how concentrated local employment is in occupations that published research identifies as exposed to current AI capabilities, and how well-positioned the local economy is to adapt.

You agree not to represent CAERI as any of the following, because it is none of them:

• It is not a forecast. No CAERI figure predicts job losses, unemployment, business closures, or economic outcomes in any place at any date. Nothing on this site projects jobs to be lost.
• It is not a measure of adoption. The underlying research measures technical capability overlap, not employer decisions, regulation, or new job creation.
• It is not a survey. County occupation figures are model-based estimates below the metro level, published with a Confidence rating that reflects source agreement, disclosure imputation, and county size.
• It is not absolute. Scores are relative standing, not quantities.

Self-employed (unincorporated) and farm-production workers are outside the county occupation estimates; no county-level occupation source exists for them.

4. Not professional advice, and not a basis for decisions about individuals

CAERI is published for planning, research, and public discussion. It is not financial, investment, credit, legal, employment, or personnel advice.

You specifically agree not to use CAERI, or any StrataHelm product, as a factor in decisions about identifiable individuals — including hiring, firing, promotion, compensation, lending, insurance underwriting, or tenancy. The index describes places, not people, and it has neither the design nor the validation to support any individual determination.

5. Accuracy, corrections, and changes to the index

Accuracy is the point of this project. If you believe a figure is wrong, tell us through the contact page with the county and the specific value, and we will review it.

The rules governing when and how the index may change — versioning, review cadence, extraordinary recalibration, corrections and restatements, and how changes are announced — are published in the governance & recalibration policy and are incorporated into these terms. Every published version is version-stamped and reproducible, and we do not quietly overwrite a bad number.

6. Acceptable use of the site and data

You may not:

• present CAERI figures in a way that misstates what they measure, in particular by describing them as forecasts or as counts of jobs affected;
• strip or obscure the attribution the CC BY 4.0 license requires;
• imply that StrataHelm endorses you, your organization, or your conclusions without our written permission;
• place automated load on the site that degrades it for others; the national download and per-county JSON files exist so that bulk users do not need to crawl the site.

7. No warranty; limitation of liability

The site and the free data are provided “as is”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the data is error-free or uninterrupted.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, StrataHelm is not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages, or for lost profits or lost data, arising from your use of the site, the data, or the services. For subscription customers, our total liability for any claim is limited to the fees paid for the service in the twelve months before the claim arose. For users of the free public layer, who pay nothing, our total liability is limited to fifty U.S. dollars.

8. Subscription accounts

Subscription products are sold to organizations, not individuals. The subscribing organization — typically a county or other unit of government — is the account holder and is responsible for its authorized users' use of the service and for keeping its user list current.

Authorized users must be identifiable staff of the subscribing organization. Credentials may not be shared, and access must be revoked when a user leaves.

9. Sharing data with another jurisdiction

Some products let two subscribing jurisdictions unlock a fuller view of each other's data, and let their staff work together in a shared workspace. This happens only on mutual consent, and the following rules govern it:

• Consent is given at the account level, by someone authorized to make a disclosure decision for the organization — not by an individual user clicking through a dialog. Sharing is a decision by the government entity.
• Consent is revocable at any time, and revocation stops future sharing. It cannot retrieve what the other jurisdiction has already seen, exported, or is legally obliged to retain.
• We keep an audit trail of who granted or revoked consent, for which counterparty, and when. Account holders can obtain their own audit trail on request.
• Sharing is free. We do not charge either party a fee to unlock a mutual data-sharing relationship.

10. Public records, retention, and open meetings

These provisions exist because our customers are government entities. Read them.

• StrataHelm is not your system of record. Content you create in a shared workspace — messages, notes, uploaded documents — is a working copy. We provide export so that you can place records into your own retention system, and it is your responsibility to do so under your jurisdiction's records-retention schedule. Do not rely on us to preserve anything for a statutory retention period.
• Content may be a public record. Correspondence between government officials about public business is likely subject to public-records law. A records request served on any participating jurisdiction may reach content held on our platform, including content contributed by the other jurisdiction. Assume anything you write in a shared workspace is disclosable.
• Open-meeting law is your responsibility. In many states, deliberation among a quorum of a governing body about public business can constitute a meeting subject to open-meeting requirements — and doing it in a private workspace can make it an unlawful closed meeting. Shared workspaces are designed for administrative staff. If members of a governing body use them, the subscribing organization is responsible for compliance with its state's open-meeting law. We do not monitor participation for this purpose and cannot advise you on it.
• We will respond to lawful process. If we receive a subpoena, records request, or court order covering customer content, we will tell the affected account holder unless we are legally prohibited from doing so.

11. Your content

You keep ownership of the content you put into the service. You grant us only the license we need to host, process, back up, and display that content in order to operate the service for you and for any jurisdiction you have consented to share with.

We do not sell customer content. We do not use identifiable customer content to market to other customers. Aggregate, de-identified usage statistics that cannot reasonably be traced to a jurisdiction may be used to improve the service.

12. Personal data

We collect the minimum needed to run accounts: the names, work email addresses, and roles of authorized users, plus ordinary server logs. We do not build profiles of members of the public, and CAERI itself is built entirely from published aggregate federal statistics — it contains no personal data about individuals.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The version and effective date at the top of this page always identify the operative version, and material changes will be announced before they take effect, on the same principle the governance & recalibration policy applies to the index: no silent changes. Continued use after the effective date means you accept the updated terms. The permanent commitments in §2 are not subject to this section.

14. Governing law and contact

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Minnesota, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. For a government customer whose own law requires its jurisdiction's governing law and venue, that requirement controls where the signed agreement says so.

Questions about these terms: contact us.