What America.gov's Own Terms Say About the Answers It Gives You

Most people meet America.gov through the chat box. The pages that tell you what the chat box is worth are buried in the footer: the terms of use, the privacy policy, and a short “about” page. Read together, they are unusually candid — the government’s own documents say the portal does not file anything for you, does not decide anything for you, and can be wrong.

That is not a reason to avoid it. It is the reason to use it as a map rather than a decision. Here is what the fine print actually says, and what each admission means in practice.

“Not the agency of record”

The terms of use, last updated September 8, 2026, open by identifying the operator: “America.gov is an official service of the United States government, operated by the General Services Administration.” It is a federal service, and its rules apply the same way nationwide — this is not a state-by-state question.

Then comes the sentence that matters most:

America.gov is not the agency of record. It does not decide your eligibility, approve a benefit, or change a filing. Only the responsible agency can do that, and the agency’s own determination always controls.

Paired with an earlier line — “Asking a question here does not submit an application, file a document, or contact an agency on your behalf” — that settles a confusion the rollout created in the first place: people asking whether they have “already applied” because they discussed it with a chatbot. You have not. Nothing moved on the agency’s side. If you meant to file something — an enrollment, a renewal, an appeal — the chat is where you found out how; it is not where it happens.

The terms go one step further and pre-empt the other common expectation. The portal “explains information and links to the agency that owns a program,” and a link “is not an endorsement.” The agency’s page is still the authority on amounts, deadlines and eligibility. If the chat and the agency page ever disagree, the agency page is the answer.

Written into the terms: the answers can be wrong

The second admission is even more direct. America.gov’s terms carry a section headed “Answers generated with SI” — SI being the abbreviation the administration uses for super intelligence in federal documents. It says:

Some answers on America.gov are generated with SI. They can be incomplete or wrong, and they can be out of date the moment a program changes.

Check the linked source before you act on an answer, especially for anything involving money, immigration status, benefits, or a deadline. Nothing here is legal, tax, medical, or financial advice.

Two things follow. The first is that this is the same instruction our network gives readers about every AI-written summary, now published by the government about its own tool — verify the consequential parts against the page it links to. The second is that the portal is explicit about not being advice in the four areas where being wrong costs the most: legal, tax, medical and financial.

An independent test published on September 30, 2026 gives that disclaimer something concrete to attach to: an infectious-disease physician, Céline Gounder, asked the chatbot 37 health questions and found answers that missed a court pause on a CDC vaccine-schedule change and described the older, voluntary version of Medicare’s $35 insulin cap. We walk through that test and a verification routine built on it in An Expert Tested America.gov’s Health Answers.

What happens to what you type

The privacy policy, last updated September 29, 2026 — launch day — is the long-form version of the short “private by design” page, and it is worth knowing before you paste anything into a chat box:

• Conversations are not saved as history. The application processes what you type to answer it, keeps the conversation in browser memory, and does not include message text in usage analytics unless you use the feedback icons. The trade-off is that there is no saved transcript to scroll back through on your next visit.
• Attachments get a best-effort scrub, not a guarantee. PDF text is extracted in your browser, and the policy says the service makes “a best-effort attempt in your browser to remove any private details” using Rampart, an open-source classifier that detects some types of personal information. The examples the policy gives are Social Security numbers, phone numbers, email addresses and credit card numbers; identifiers it does not name — a case number, a patient ID, an account number, medical detail — are not among them. Send the page the question needs, not the whole file.
• Voice input leaves the government’s servers out of part of the trip. America.gov uses your browser’s built-in speech recognition, and the policy names the likely provider by browser: Google in Chrome, Apple in Safari, Microsoft Azure in desktop Edge. Your browser “may send microphone audio directly to that provider for transcription under its privacy practices.” America.gov receives the text, not the audio. If the number you are about to say is your Social Security number, type it.
• Feedback is stored for up to a year, together with the answer, its sources and metadata — and the policy asks you not to include personal information in comments.
• Caching is real but narrow. AI-generated answers sit in Cloudflare storage for up to two hours; the cache key is a hash of your prompt rather than the prompt text, though the cached answer itself is not hashed. Search results are kept up to two hours; generated follow-up suggestions up to 30 days. Operational measurements using pseudonymous identifiers are kept up to 90 days. Cloudflare security logs, which may include your network address, are kept for 12 months, against Cloudflare’s own published enterprise limits of up to 30 days for security events and up to 90 days for security analytics.
• The AI vendors do not get to keep or reuse it. The policy states that America.gov’s AI providers operate under zero-data-retention agreements and are contractually barred from selling your information, building advertising profiles, or training their models on your data. It also says the site uses no advertising cookies and no third-party trackers, and does not currently take part in federal web analytics programs.

The honest limit on all of this: these are the government’s published statements about its own service, not an independent audit. The same terms say the service is provided “as is,” with no warranty that it will be error-free or uninterrupted. Treat the privacy page as the operator’s account of what happens to your data, which is the best available description and still a description.

The seal paragraph — and why it protects the impostors

One clause in the reuse section deserves attention. Most America.gov content is a work of the United States government and in the public domain; you can reuse it freely. But the terms carve out material that is not the government’s to license — third-party logos, trademarks, photographs and agency seals — and prohibit using “a government seal or logo in a way that suggests endorsement of your product, service, or organization.”

Read the practical consequence: the portal’s text and its screenshots are largely free to copy, and its look — seal, type, layout — is reproducible by anyone, so an official-looking page proves nothing on its own. Design is not verification. The address bar is — and the domain-by-domain habits that catch look-alikes are in Is That Really America.gov?.

What to do with an answer you plan to act on

1. Follow the links before the instructions. The terms tell you to check the linked source; do it before the deadline, not after.
2. Move consequential questions to the agency that owns the program. For amounts, deadlines and eligibility, the agency’s own page and phone line are the record. The portal is a routing layer, and it says so.
3. Confirm that nothing was filed. If your question was really an application, complete it on the agency site. A chat has no receipt.
4. Keep your own note — the date, the answer, the link you checked. If a deadline is disputed later, what the agency’s record says is what counts.
5. If you attached more than you should have, act anyway. Best-effort scrubbing is not a guarantee, so treat anything you uploaded as having left your device: watch your accounts, and if you handed over a Social Security number, work through the recovery plan at identitytheft.gov.

The bottom line

The fine print is more useful than the marketing page. America.gov is free, needs no account, and now says plainly what it is: a front door that explains and routes, written by an AI system that can be out of date, disclaimed as advice in the four areas where advice matters most, and backed by an agency that still holds the decision. Used that way, it saves real time. Used as an authority, it is a liability you chose.

The rest of this series

• What Is America.gov? The New Federal Front Door, Explained — what launched on September 29, 2026, under which authority, and what is still only a roadmap.
• Your First Passport Is Going Online — the State Department’s timeline for first-time applications.
• An Expert Tested America.gov’s Health Answers — where the chatbot was right and wrong on coverage.
• Medicare Enrollment Is Moving Toward America.gov — what changes for Medicare, what does not, and the penalty worth avoiding.
• Is That Really America.gov? — twelve checks that separate a real .gov site from an impostor.
• The network’s official government resources directory collects the primary sources behind these guides.

This article is general information about a federal service, not legal or financial advice. It is AI-written and independently AI-reviewed before publication; the review standard and this article’s findings are recorded in the network’s editorial review log.