About WaterKnown
We read the reports so labels can't lie to you
WaterKnown is an independent water quality information service. We collect the public record on waters, filters, and city taps, translate it, and score it against health guidance, with the citation under every number. No brand pays us, and no brand can.
How this started
In 2024 our founders ordered lab panels on six bottled waters from their own pantry, expecting a boring afternoon. Two came back with PFAS. Digging into it, they found something stranger than the results: most of what anyone would want to know already existed somewhere. Utility reports, EPA monitoring files, FDA surveys, brand disclosures. All public. Almost none of it read.
That gap became the company. Water is the one thing everyone consumes daily, and it's sold almost entirely on imagery: mountains, glaciers, the word "pure" in a serif font. The actual contents sit in reports written for regulators, formatted to be skimmed past, and scattered across a hundred websites. Our job is to collect those reports, translate them into plain language, and hold them to health guidance instead of legal minimums. We don't run lab panels of our own yet. When we say a number, we show you whose report it came from.
The three rules
- Cite everything. Every number on this site links to the report it came from: who published it, when, at what detection limit. A number without a source doesn't get published.
- Hold everyone to the same yardstick. Health-based guidance, not legal minimums, applied identically to every brand and every city, whether the result flatters them or not.
- Publish silence. Where the evidence does not exist, we say so plainly rather than filling the gap. That is why this site has no bottled water brand scores: no agency publishes brand-level results, so nobody can produce one honestly from public data.
How we make money
Affiliate commissions, and we would rather tell you plainly than bury it. When you buy a filter through a link on this site, the retailer pays us a percentage. That costs you nothing and changes nothing about the price you pay. It is how the research gets funded.
Here is the part that matters: the commission is paid by the retailer, not the manufacturer, and it is the same percentage whether a product scores 91 or 34. No brand can buy a score, a placement, or a review, because no brand pays us at all. Our scores come from accredited certification listings we do not control and cannot influence, which is exactly why we built the method on certification rather than on our own opinion of a product.
WaterKnown at a glance
Editorial standards
Who writes this, and what we do and don't claim
Everything on WaterKnown is written and maintained by our editorial team, and published under the company name rather than an individual byline. We take water quality seriously enough to be precise about our own limits.
What we are
A small team that reads primary sources for a living. We spend our time inside utility Consumer Confidence Reports, EPA monitoring files, and NSF certification listings, and we are good at pulling a defensible number out of a badly formatted PDF and saying exactly where it came from. That is the skill this site is built on.
What we are not
We are not toxicologists, epidemiologists, or physicians, and we do not present ourselves as any of those. When a question is about what a contaminant does to the human body, we do not invent an answer or paraphrase one into something that sounds authoritative. We link to the agencies whose job that is: EPA on lead in drinking water, CDC on lead exposure, ATSDR on PFAS health effects, and EPA on PFAS risk.
The rules we hold ourselves to
- Every number carries its source. If we cannot link the report a figure came from, the figure does not publish.
- We never fill a gap with an estimate. A missing measurement is shown as missing. A system with no PFAS testing is never described as PFAS-free.
- We publish the method. The scoring formula is public in full, so anyone can recompute a score by hand and tell us if we are wrong.
- We correct in the open. Errors get fixed with a note, not a silent edit.
- No brand pays us. We earn affiliate commission from retailers when you buy through our links, disclosed on every page it applies to. We take no money from manufacturers: no sponsorships, no paid placements, no paid reviews, no free samples in exchange for coverage.
Using our data
The underlying government records are public domain: EPA publishes them and anyone may use them. What we add is the collection, repair, translation and scoring, and that work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.
In plain terms: use our figures, quote them, build on them, including commercially. Just credit WaterKnown and link back. We would rather the numbers travel with attribution than sit behind a wall, because the point of the project is that this information stops being invisible.
Two things that licence does not cover. It does not apply to product certification listings, which belong to NSF, WQA and IAPMO. And it is not a warranty: we correct errors when we find them, and anyone republishing a figure should check it against the source we cite.
Found something wrong?
Tell us. Corrections from readers who know their local system better than we do are the fastest way this site improves, and we would rather be corrected than be confidently wrong. Use the form below.
Contact
Request a city, a product, or a correction
Cities and products get queued by request volume, so writing in genuinely moves the list. Spotted an error in a report? Say so: corrections publish with a changelog, not a quiet edit.
Use the form to reach us
Got it. A real person reads these, and you'll hear back within two business days.