CLT Explorer

An informal, fun visitors guide to the Queen City — deeply sourced, and nobody pays to be in it.

Status: in development

Platforms: Web

An informal, fun visitors guide to Charlotte, North Carolina — written like a local friend showing you around, built like a reference you can trust. Three hundred and forty-nine places across twenty-two districts, every one of them real, with sources cited on the page where each fact appears. No pay-to-play, no SEO sludge: nobody pays to be included, and nothing anyone pays for could change what the guide says about them.

Underneath the guide sits a genuine archive — six hundred and seventy-seven dated history facts across sixteen eras, a hundred and twenty-six people and a hundred and one organisations, twelve prose chapters running from 1540 to 2025, and a knowledge graph of nearly seven hundred nodes you can explore visually. The city is mapped along its spine, the LYNX Blue Line, with live rail tracking off the transit agency’s own feed. There are tours, trip planning, game-day pages, bird and species guides, crosswords and mini-games tied to a Sand Dollars economy of badges and streaks.

It installs as a web app and keeps working offline. Like its sibling guide to Ocean City, it is also deliberately built to be read by AI agents: every page has a clean Markdown twin at the same address, and the site publishes its own machine-readable index and tool surface.

It is independent and unaffiliated with the City of Charlotte or any business listed in it. Sign-in is optional and almost everything works signed out, with your progress kept in your own browser. There are no analytics, no trackers, no device permissions, and no payments of any kind. The privacy page lists everything that is stored when you do sign in, and the deletion page removes it.