Old Glory vs the FTC "All or Virtually All" Standard: What a Scanner Can Flag, and What Only Your Records Can Prove

Before anything else, the sentence that decides who is responsible for a “Made in USA” claim. The FTC's guidance on complying with the standard says a marketer “must have — and must rely on — a ‘reasonable basis’” for an unqualified claim, and “needs competent and reliable evidence” that the product is “all or virtually all” made in the United States — before the claim goes up, with “an ongoing obligation to review their claims and substantiation.” That evidence lives in your sourcing records: supplier invoices, component origin documentation, cost breakdowns. It does not live in your storefront, which means nothing that reads a storefront can supply it — not Google, not an auditor's crawler, and not Old Glory, our own Made-in-USA claims scanner for Shopify.

So this comparison is not a scanner against a rival scanner. It is a scanner against the legal standard it orbits — two instruments that get confused for each other constantly, and shouldn't be. The FTC's standard is satisfied by records. The scanner reads the shape of your copy and cross-checks it against one structured field you already own. The article is about the seam between those two jobs: the engine grades whether your words are the kind that trigger the standard, and your records are the only thing that can satisfy it. A store can score 100 and be in violation. A store can be flagged and be perfectly lawful. If that sentence sounds like a product talking itself down, good — it's the honest one, and by the end you'll know exactly why.

What the Standard Actually Requires

The FTC's bar for an unqualified U.S.-origin claim is “all or virtually all”: final assembly or processing happens in the United States, all significant processing happens in the United States, and all or virtually all ingredients or components are made and sourced here — in the guidance's own words, “the product should contain no — or negligible — foreign content.” Since August 2021 that standard has teeth beyond a cease-and-desist: the Made in USA Labeling Rule (16 C.F.R. Part 323) codified it for labels, and marketers who put an unqualified label on a product that doesn't meet the bar are “subject to civil penalties” — “including in catalogs or online.” That last phrase is what makes this a Shopify story. Your product page is a label.

The penalty ceiling, checked against the Federal Register the morning this published: up to $53,088 per violation for a knowing violation of a rule under Section 5(m)(1)(A) of the FTC Act, set by the Commission's January 2025 inflation adjustment and not revised since. Hold the shape of that number carefully — it is a statutory maximum for a knowing violation, not a flat fine the FTC hands every merchant it writes to. But it is the ceiling a court can reach, per violation, and the FTC's enforcement year (more on that below) has been pointed squarely at origin claims.

And the standard reaches further than the literal phrase “Made in USA.” The guidance is explicit that “U.S. symbols or geographic references (for example, U.S. flags, outlines of U.S. maps, or references to U.S. locations of headquarters or factories) may convey a claim of U.S. origin either by themselves, or in conjunction with other phrases or images.” An implied claim is held to the same evidence bar as an express one. The question is never “did you type the magic words” — it's “what would a reasonable customer take from the page.”

The Cleanest Illustration on Record

If you want one story that separates copy from records, the FTC published it on April 14, 2026, in a sweep announcing three enforcement actions over Made-in-USA claims. One of them: the Commission sued TouchTunes Music Company, alleging its electronic dartboards were falsely marketed as “Made in the USA.” Here is the detail that matters. Per the FTC's complaint, TouchTunes did complete final assembly of the dartboards in the United States — and the unqualified claim was still alleged false, because many components “essential to the function and operation of the products, such as computer chips, cameras, and flatscreen monitors” were made abroad.

Final assembly here. Claim still alleged deceptive. No scanner reading that product page could have adjudicated it — the words “Made in the USA” look identical on a compliant page and an alleged-deceptive one. The difference lived entirely in the bill of materials, which is to say: in the records. That is the whole comparison, in one federal complaint.

What the Scanner Actually Reads

Old Glory's engine reads five fields of every product — title, description, product type, tags, and vendor — plus your store's public pages, and matches them against a curated term list: currently 31 unqualified claim terms, 22 qualified ones, and 6 implied ones, under a ruleset versioned 2026-06-05 — 73 days old as this publishes, and we print that date for the same reason we print it for Merchant Guard: a rule snapshot ages, and a scanner that hides its date is implying it doesn't. Against those claims it holds the one structured origin fact your store already carries: the declared country of origin on each variant's inventory item, pulled over Shopify's Admin API for up to 1,000 products. A product whose copy says “proudly made in the USA” while its own inventory record declares a non-U.S. country of origin is the highest-severity flag the engine can raise — a direct contradiction between your words and your own data.

Read that sentence again, though, because its limits are doing as much work as its power. The contradiction the scanner catches is between copy and a declared field — a field a merchant filled in, not a verified supply chain. The engine's own source code carries the discipline note we make every product on this shelf state: “we flag the RISK that an origin claim may not meet the FTC ‘all or virtually all’ standard given the store's declared country-of-origin data. We never certify compliance or verify the supply chain.” The FTC's evidence bar — component sourcing, significant processing, cost composition — sits entirely outside anything an API returns.

Where the Keyword Layer Stops

A term list is a term list, and honesty about one means testing it against reality. We ran the exact claim phrases the FTC's April complaint alleged through the engine's detector. “Made in the USA,” “All-American Made,” “100% Made in the USA,” “100% American Made Tough” — all flagged. “Built by Americans for Americans” — no hit at all. A phrase the FTC itself charged as an origin claim sails through the keyword layer, because it asserts origin by implication and idiom rather than by any term on the list.

Same story for state-origin claims: “Made in Texas” and “Made in Vermont” return nothing, because the list has no state terms. That gap stopped being hypothetical on July 6, 2026, when the FTC announced warning letters to seven companies over questionable “Made in the USA” claims — drums, industrial laser machinery, coordinate measuring machines, e-cigarettes — plus one company over “Made in Texas.” The regulator is reading more broadly than the term list does. Our ruleset's version date, 2026-06-05, postdates the April sweep and predates those July letters; the letters are not in it yet.

One divergence runs the other direction, and it's worth naming because it makes the scanner stricter than the guidance in one spot: the engine classifies the U.S. flag emoji in product copy as an express unqualified claim, while the FTC treats U.S. symbols as conveying an implied claim whose meaning depends on context. If your product copy leans on 🇺🇸 as decoration, Old Glory will read it as an origin assertion. The FTC might too — “by themselves, or in conjunction with other phrases or images” — but that's a judgment call the engine deliberately refuses to make in your favor.

The Qualified-Claim Seam

Here is the scanner's most consequential design choice, stated plainly so you can decide what to do with it. The FTC recognizes qualified origin claims — “Assembled in USA,” “Made in USA from imported parts” — as the compliant pattern for products with foreign content. Old Glory follows that structure: when a product's copy carries a qualified claim, the engine treats the product as following the compliant pattern and raises no product-level flag — even if an unqualified claim sits elsewhere in the same copy, and even if the declared origin would otherwise contradict it. One qualified phrase, and the scanner stands down on that product.

The Pillar That Measures a Page's Name

Old Glory scores three pillars — origin claims, origin data, substantiation — and combines them pessimistically, the shelf's standing formula: 60% your worst pillar plus 40% the average, graded bluntly (85+ low risk, 65 watch, 40 at risk, below that high risk). The substantiation pillar deserves its own disclosure. When your storefront makes a store-wide U.S.-origin claim, the engine checks whether a sourcing or origin disclosure page exists — and it detects that from the page's handle and title, not its contents. A store page named “Sourcing” downgrades that finding from high to medium severity — on a storefront whose only substantiation finding is that one, that's the difference between a 65 and an 85 — whether the page holds your complete component-origin documentation or a single sentence. We could pretend the engine reads the page and judges your evidence. It doesn't, and per the opening section of this article, it couldn't: judging the evidence is the FTC's test, and the evidence isn't on the page. The pillar measures whether you've built the shelf your records should sit on. Only you know if the shelf is empty.

The Year the Stakes Changed

Three dated facts, because “enforcement is heating up” is the kind of sentence that should have receipts. March 13, 2026: the President signed Executive Order 14392, “Ensuring Truthful Advertising of Products Claiming To Be Made in America,” directing the FTC Chairman to “prioritize enforcement actions” over American-origin claims and to consider proposing rules under which an online marketplace's failure to verify country-of-origin claims could itself be an unfair or deceptive practice. Read the fine print with us: the order sets no penalty, imposes no new obligation on any merchant, and expressly “does not create any right or benefit” enforceable at law. It is a prioritization directive — consider-and-propose, not require-and-verify — and anyone telling you marketplaces are “now required” to verify origin claims is ahead of the law. April 14, 2026: the FTC announced its Made-in-USA sweep — three enforcement actions, covering flag and flagpole display kits, the TouchTunes dartboards above, and footwear — explicitly framed as following the March order. July 6, 2026: the warning letters, seven companies plus the “Made in Texas” one. Prioritized enforcement, announced, then executed twice in four months. The obligation on you didn't change this year. The odds of being asked about it did.

The Verdict