How we calculate and verify
This page explains where every number on GoldHub comes from, how often it changes, and what it does and does not mean. If you find something here that does not match what the site shows you, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.
The gold price
The headline price is the spot price of one troy ounce of gold in US dollars (XAU/USD). It is fetched from a live market feed and cached on our server for 60 seconds, so every visitor sees the same number and the source is called once per minute regardless of how many people are on the site.
A snapshot is written to our own price history every 15 minutes. That history is what draws the charts and what the daily change is measured against. The change figure compares the current price to the most recent snapshot that is at least 24 hours old — if our history does not yet reach back that far, we hide the change rather than compare against a point two hours ago and call it a daily move.
We read from more than one price source and compare them. If they disagree by more than a set threshold, the site raises an alarm to the operator rather than quietly publishing whichever number arrived first. If the feed goes down entirely, the price is labelled as delayed instead of showing a stale number as if it were live.
Spot, not futures
This matters more than it sounds. Many articles that rank for “gold price today” quote the futures contract, which trades at a different price from spot — the gap is routinely tens of dollars per ounce and is rarely explained to the reader. If you are selling physical gold, spot is the number your payout is derived from. Futures is not.
Karat values
Karat prices are pure arithmetic, and you can check them yourself:
value per gram = spot price per ounce ÷ 31.1034768 × purity
31.1034768 is the number of grams in a troy ounce. Purity is the karat fraction: 24K = 1.000, 22K = 0.9167, 18K = 0.750, 14K = 0.5833, 10K = 0.4167.
This is melt value, not an offer. It is what the gold in an item is worth as metal at today’s spot price. No buyer pays 100% of melt — they have refining costs, overheads and a margin. Any site that shows you a melt figure and implies it is what you will be handed is misleading you.
What buyers actually pay
The gap between melt value and the cheque is the single most useful number in this market, and almost nobody publishes it. We report it as a percentage of spot alongside the date it was measured.
Every payout percentage on this site carries the date it was measured. A payout figure without a date is not data — gold moves daily, and a percentage collected eighteen months ago tells you nothing about what a shop will offer this morning. Our system refuses to publish a payout figure that has no measurement date attached.
We are building this dataset city by city. Where we have not measured a business, we say so rather than estimating. A blank is more honest than a guess.
The buyer directory
Listings are built from openly licensed and public-record sources:
- Overture Maps Places — CDLA Permissive 2.0
- FSQ OS Places — Apache 2.0
- State licensing registers — public records of precious-metal dealer and pawnbroker licences
We deliberately do not build the directory on Google Places or Yelp data. Both prohibit using their data to build a directory, and a listings site built on a licence that forbids listings is one policy review away from disappearing. Using open data means we can show you a licence number, tell you where we got it, and keep it.
Where a business holds a state licence, we link to the register entry so you can verify it yourself rather than taking our word for it.
Why some city pages are thin
A city page needs at least three verified listings before we submit it to search engines. Below that threshold the page still works if you land on it, but it is marked noindex. We would rather have fewer real pages than a hundred empty ones.
Automated content
Our daily gold price report is generated automatically from that day’s price data on a schedule. The figures in it are pulled directly from the same price history that powers the charts; the wording around them is templated. We disclose this because an automatically written article presented as hand-written analysis is deceptive, and because you should know which pages on a site had a human judgement applied to them and which did not.
Editorial articles, methodology, and payout measurements are not automated.
Corrections
If a price, a calculation, a licence status or a payout figure on this site is wrong, email osamamarketingsa@gmail.com. Corrections to data are made as soon as they are verified. We do not quietly edit a published figure without noting that it changed.