Last updated: August 30, 2026
All About Ticks is a one-person site. There is no editorial board and no staff, and pretending otherwise would be the first thing worth correcting on a page about trust. This page says who writes it, what he is and is not qualified to say, how the work is actually done, and how you can push back on any of it.
Who runs All About Ticks
Phillip George
Founder, writer, and editor, All About Ticks
Phillip is an independent researcher and writer who started All About Ticks to gather trustworthy, plain-language tick information into one place. He is not a physician, a veterinarian, or an entomologist, holds no clinical or entomological qualification, and has no affiliation with any health agency, university, clinic, or manufacturer. His work here is reading the primary sources — public health agencies such as the CDC and the Public Health Agency of Canada, provincial and state health authorities, university extension programmes, and peer-reviewed studies — and turning them into clear guides that cite those authorities next to the claim.
He researches, writes, and maintains every page, revises them as official guidance changes, and handles reader corrections himself. Every substantive claim is meant to be traceable to a cited source, so a reader can check the site against the agency rather than taking it on faith.
What that means for you as a reader
The useful way to read a site like this one is as a well-organised index into official guidance, not as an authority in its own right. Where a page here and a cited agency page disagree, the agency is right. Where a question needs someone to look at you, your animal, or your tick, the site says so and names the service that can.
- What the author can do well: read primary sources carefully, notice when a number carries a caveat, compare guidance across jurisdictions, and write it in plain language with the citation attached.
- What he cannot do: diagnose, interpret test results, advise on medication, identify a tick from your photograph, or judge whether your particular bite needs treatment.
How AI is used here
Content on this site is researched and drafted with AI assistance, then verified against its primary sources and edited by Phillip George before publication. He is accountable for everything that appears.
The verification step is the part that matters, so it is worth being specific about it. AI is not treated as a source. Statistics, dates, species-to-pathogen relationships, and clinical statements are each checked against the cited agency page individually, because those are precisely the details a language model will produce fluently and get wrong. A claim that cannot be traced to a citable primary source is cut rather than published on a model's say-so. The sourcing rules that govern this are set out in the Editorial Policy.
How a page gets made
- Start from a real question. Usually something readers are actually searching for, such as when tick season ends in a particular province, or which ticks in a region carry which pathogens.
- Find the authority that answers it. National agency first, then the provincial or state authority for anything local, then extension services and peer-reviewed literature where an agency has not addressed the question.
- Draft with the source open. Each claim is written from the source page rather than from memory or from another site's summary of it.
- Cite next to the claim. Links sit in the sentence or in the note beneath it, not in a bibliography at the bottom, so one sentence can be checked without auditing a whole page.
- Keep the caveats. Where a source qualifies its own data, the qualification comes across with the number.
- Date it and revisit it. Every substantive page carries a visible "Last updated" date reflecting its last content revision, and several also carry a "What changed in this update" block summarising what moved. The date is the date of the last editorial change, not the date you happen to be reading, so a page dated some months ago is one we have not needed to revise rather than one we have forgotten.
Independence
All About Ticks is an independent, self-funded project supported by advertising served programmatically through Google AdSense (see the Advertising Disclosure). We are not affiliated with any government agency, product manufacturer, or clinic, we sell nothing, and there are no affiliate links on the site, so no recommendation here can earn us a commission. Advertisers have no input into what is published. When we are not certain, we say so and point to the relevant public health authority.
Medical and scientific review status
The Medical/Scientific Review Policy spells out what review does happen, what does not, and what to do instead of relying on this site for a clinical decision.
How to challenge or correct the content
Disagreement is welcome and it is the mechanism that keeps a single-author site honest. The strongest correction quotes the sentence you think is wrong, says what it should say, and links a source: a public health agency, a provincial or state health authority, a university extension service, or a paper with a DOI. Reports without a source still get read, and often send us back to the primary source to check ourselves.
What happens next is set out in the Corrections Policy. In short: we re-read both sources, fix the page if it is wrong, update the visible date, note the change where the change affects what a reader should do, and reply with our reasoning if we conclude the page was right. Correctors are not named publicly unless they ask to be.
Contact
The Contact page has the email address, what to include for each kind of message, and an honest list of what we can and cannot help with. What we hold about you as a reader, and what advertising cookies do, is covered in the Privacy Policy.