Verification is public and does not require an account (see Why there's no account to create for why Agreebase works this way generally). It answers two related questions: does the submitted artifact match this record, and is this record the current sealed authority?
What you need
You can verify with:
- The AGR reference for the record.
- The full text of an agreement, declaration, or retained text notarization.
- A body hash or notarization content hash.
- A signed PDF/document hash.
- A blockchain transaction hash.
You can also request a public certificate using only the AGR reference. A certificate confirms the public record status and available sealing information; it is not a positive match for a document you hold.
The web verifier is available at /verify. A specific record can be opened at /verify/{agr_reference}.
What verification checks
A verification result answers two separate questions, and it's worth keeping them apart: does what you submitted match the sealed record, and is that record still the current authority (or has it since been superseded by an amendment)? A "match" on an old, superseded version is a real match, but it's not the same as matching the agreement as it stands today; the result tells you which one you have.
For agreements and declarations, Agreebase compares whatever you submit against the exact text and hash it sealed: submit the full text and it's normalized and hashed the same way it was at sealing, or submit the body hash directly if that's what you have. Some newer records can also fall back to a fuzzy fingerprint, which can recognize near-complete or lightly-altered text as a probable match even when it isn't byte-for-byte identical; useful as a recovery signal when you don't have the exact original, but it is never reported as an exact match, and shouldn't be treated as one. See Verification hashes for how that works.
For notarizations, the content hash is the primary check: submit the digest, or (for a file) select the file itself so your browser hashes it locally the same way it did at notarization time; the file itself is never uploaded to Agreebase. If the notarization retained normalized text, you can also submit that text directly instead of a hash. A transaction hash can be checked against the stored sealing transaction whenever the blockchain provider is able to read it back.
Privacy boundaries
Public verification does not reveal private signer names, emails, contact hashes, network evidence, or signature execution payloads. It is meant to answer whether a record matches, not to expose participant data.
The response may report an identicon and public blockchain metadata, but an identicon is only a secondary visual fingerprint.
If verification fails
A failed or non-authoritative result can mean:
- The AGR reference is wrong or does not exist.
- The submitted text is incomplete or changed.
- The submitted hash belongs to another artifact.
- A notarization does not retain text for text comparison.
- The record matched but is not sealed yet.
- The record matched an older version that has been superseded.
- The blockchain provider is unavailable.
Compare the source document carefully, normalize or hash it using the method in Comparing document hashes, and retry with the most exact artifact available.