Glossary / API integration / Source quality
A ParlayAPI glossary entry

Source quality

Source quality measures how fresh and reliable each sportsbook's data is within an odds aggregator's feed: when the book was last successfully read, how stale its prices are allowed to get, and whether it is currently meeting its freshness target.

In practice

Aggregated odds are only as good as their weakest source. A scanner that treats a 90-second-old price as live will hallucinate arbs and edges against a book that has simply gone stale - so production systems check per-book freshness before acting, and drop books that fall out of tolerance.

Where it shows up in ParlayAPI

ParlayAPI publishes per-book freshness live at /v1/meta/source-quality, with the per-book thresholds it holds itself to at /v1/meta/per-book-sla. Wiring these into your pipeline - skip books currently out of SLA - is the single highest-value robustness check for any odds consumer.

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