# Verified Course > Canonical: https://pinflag.io/glossary/verified-course ## Verified Course URL: https://pinflag.io/glossary/verified-course > A verified course is one whose geometry — greens, tees, fairways, hazards, and boundaries — has been confirmed accurate by a professional survey or a physical, on-the-ground walk, rather than left as unverified map data. Most course mapping is built from satellite imagery, aerial photography, or crowd-sourced points, which is usable for a general on-course map but not necessarily precise enough to price a shot in strokes down to a specific yard. Verification closes that gap by confirming the geometry against reality, one course at a time. PinFlag holds a single verification standard: a professional survey or the operator's own ground-truth walk of the course, and nothing weaker earns the label. A course that fails a check on units, topology, or hole count doesn't get to call itself verified with a caveat attached; live strokes gained is disabled on it instead. Verification status travels with everything computed on that course. A [Measured](https://pinflag.io/glossary/measured-vs-estimated) reading requires verified geometry as one of its four conditions, so an unverified course can only ever produce Estimated numbers, regardless of how good the GPS signal is that day. See also: [Strokes Gained Explained: The Complete Guide](https://pinflag.io/guides/strokes-gained)