How we verify rap quotes

Quote sites are full of lines that were never said, lyrics with a word changed, and songs credited to the wrong album. RapQuotes.net exists to avoid that. Nothing on this site is written from memory: every quote is copied from a source and checked against it before it goes up, and every card links to the page that proves it.

Lyrics: matched against Genius

1. Candidate lines come from published “best lyrics” articles and artist roundups. Search tools find the articles; the lines are copied from them verbatim.
2. The verifier finds the song’s page on Genius and fetches the full lyrics.
3. It looks for the candidate inside a window of one to four consecutive lines of the song and scores the match from 0 to 1.
4. A lyric is published only if the match score is 0.85 or higher. The quote is then stored in Genius’s exact wording, not in the article’s wording, and the Genius page is linked on the card.
5. The verifier then checks who performs that part. Genius marks each section of a song with its performer, such as “Verse 2: Drake”. A line counts for an artist only if its section names that artist (or a member, when the artist is a group), or if the section names nobody and the page is the artist’s own song. Choruses sung by a guest, a featured verse and a spoken intro by someone else are left out, even when the song is the artist’s.
6. A line found only on a cover, remix or live page is matched again to the original song’s page, or left out.
7. Candidates that cannot be matched to a Genius page, match below the threshold, or sit in someone else’s part are left out.

The year shown with a lyric is the release year on the song’s Genius page. We do not check it against other discographies.

Interviews and speeches: verbatim in a cited source

Interview, speech and book quotes must appear verbatim in the article, transcript or profile we cite, allowing for differences in punctuation, spelling and line breaks, and that link sits on the card. Quote farms that give a line and a name but no source for it, such as BrainyQuote, Goodreads, AZQuotes and caption sites, are rejected as sources, and a line found only there does not get in. A “best quotes” roundup from a music publication (American Songwriter, for example) is accepted only as a secondary source: those cards say Source instead of Verified, because the original interview is not confirmed.

What the badges mean

• Verified · Genius: a lyric matched against its Genius page at 0.85 or higher.
• Verified · <site>: an interview or speech quote found verbatim in the primary or reported article named on the card.
• Source · <site>: the text was found verbatim in a secondary roundup, but we could not confirm it in the original interview. The wording is checked against the page we link; the original context is not.

How lines are chosen

Being accurate is not enough for a line to be listed. Each verified quote is scored from 1 to 5 for how quotable it is: punchy, self-contained, the kind of line you would put in a bio or a caption. Two models score each line independently, the scores are averaged, and ties go to the second, stronger model’s score; only lines that score 3 or higher stay in the library. Models help find and rate lines. They do not write quotes or fix wording: the words on the page come from the source.

Collection pages such as the best rap quotes and rap senior quotes apply further rules (minimum score, length, themes, a cap per artist) to this same verified library. Their intros are computed from the quotes they show.

Profanity

Lyrics and quotes appear as they were written. Nothing is censored, except on the one page that is built to be school-safe, rap senior quotes, which filters profanity, drugs, guns and violence.

Copyright and credit

Lyrics belong to their writers and publishers. We show short excerpts, credit the artist and song, and link to the full lyrics on Genius. Interview quotes link to the original article.

Corrections and takedowns

Found a wrong word, a wrong song, a misattributed line, or a lyric you hold the rights to and want removed? Email admin@rapquotes.net with the page address, the quote and what is wrong (or, for a takedown, who you are and what you hold rights to). We check every report against the source, then fix the quote or remove it.