Questions mineral owners actually ask

Plain English, no sales pitch. If your question isn't here, ask it at the bottom — a real person answers, and good questions end up on this page.

Why we're here

For as long as anyone can remember, the person offering to buy your minerals has known exactly what they were worth — and you haven't. They had the data, the analysts, and the models. You had a letter in the mail and a week to answer it. That gap is not a side effect of the business. It is the business, and it has quietly cost Texas families more than anybody has ever added up.

This is the first time that technology has been pointed the other way. Every advantage the buyers built for themselves, aiLandValue now builds for you: AI reading the entire public record every night across all 254 counties, and our own valuation models turning it into a real number for your acreage — the same kind of analysis that used to exist only on the other side of the table.

It is free, it takes a few minutes, and it belongs to you. No landman, no fee, no waiting a week to be told what someone else already knew.

And you don't have to work it out on your own. Is My Offer Fair? Chat puts you in a room with other mineral owners in your county — people getting the same letters, from the same buyers, about the same wells, who will tell you plainly what they were offered.

For once, the AI is on your side of the table. Know what your family owns — then decide what to do about it.

The letter in the mail

I got an offer letter for my minerals. Why now?
Almost always because something changed in the public record near your acreage — a permit was filed, a well was approved, or drilling started. Mineral buyers watch the same public filings this site does, and a letter usually means someone saw activity before you did. It is not a sign that you have to sell, and it is not an appraisal. It's the opening number in a negotiation.
Is the offer in my letter a fair price?
Sometimes. First offers are often on the low end, because the person making them knows more than you do at that moment — that asymmetry is the entire business model. The test is whether that number is supported by what the public record shows for wells and permits near your acreage — which is what the county estimate on What's It Worth? is for.
Do I have to sell?
No. Minerals can be held indefinitely and passed down, and unsolicited offers carry no obligation whatsoever. Selling converts a stream of uncertain future income into cash today. Whether that's a good trade depends on your situation, not on the letter's deadline — and "this offer expires Friday" is a sales tactic, not a fact about your minerals.

The words in the letter

What does "spud" mean?
Spud is the day the drill bit first goes into the ground. It's the single most important date in the permit file, because a permit is only an intention — an operator can file one and never drill. A spud date means it's really happening. That's why aiLandValue treats "drilling started near you" as the alert worth interrupting your day for.
What's the difference between a permit, an approval, and a well?
A permit application is an operator asking the state for permission to drill at a location. An approved permit is the state saying yes; it's still just paperwork. A well exists once they spud and drill it. Plenty of approved permits expire without a hole ever being made. The map shows all three states in different colors.
What is a net mineral acre?
Your share of the minerals under a tract, expressed in acres. If you own a 1/4 interest in the minerals under 160 acres, you own 40 net mineral acres — even though there's only one 160-acre tract. It's the unit almost every mineral conversation is priced in.
What is a net royalty acre, and why does everyone use it?
A net royalty acre normalizes your acreage to a standard 1/8 (12.5%) royalty, so two owners on different lease terms can be compared:

net royalty acres = net mineral acres × (your royalty ÷ 0.125)

40 net mineral acres leased at a 25% royalty is 80 net royalty acres — same dirt, twice the income per acre, so roughly twice the value per acre. When a buyer quotes "$X per acre", ask which acre they mean. The two numbers can differ by 2× or more.
What is a lease bonus?
The up-front, per-acre cash an operator pays you to sign a lease, separate from any royalty you'd earn later. It's paid whether or not a well is ever drilled, and it's the anchor for valuing minerals that are leased but not yet producing — the rule of thumb being a small multiple of the bonus you were paid.
What's the difference between owning minerals and owning the surface?
They're separate properties in Texas and are very often owned by different people — an arrangement called a severed estate. Owning the land does not mean you own what's under it, and owning the minerals doesn't mean you own the pasture. Any tool that tells you who owns the minerals by looking at surface property records is guessing, and aiLandValue won't do that.

What this site knows, and what it doesn't

Where does the data come from?
The official public record — the drilling permits operators are required to file with the state. We refresh from every public source available to us every night. Nothing here is scraped from another company's website or bought from a data vendor, and nothing reaches the map until it has passed a battery of automated checks. If the night's data looks wrong, we publish nothing and keep yesterday's rather than show you something we don't trust.
Why are some pins solid and some hollow?
Not every permit is published with an exact location. Where one source leaves a permit unplaced we resolve it against the others, which is why at the moment every pin on the map is solid. A solid pin is a real GPS location. A hollow pin is a permit we know the county for but not the spot, so it sits at the center of its county, nudged slightly so overlapping pins stay tappable. Hollow pins become solid on their own the night a real location turns up. We'd rather show you an honest approximation labeled as one than quietly hide the activity.
Can you tell me whether I own minerals?
No — and be skeptical of anyone who says software can. Mineral ownership for non-producing acreage lives in county clerk deed records across 254 separate counties and requires reading a chain of title. It's real work done by a person. What this site can tell you is what's happening around a location you already know about.
How accurate is the valuation estimate?
It's an honest ballpark from public records and standard rules of thumb, and every number on the site carries a label saying how confident it is. It is not an appraisal and never will be called one. The biggest missing piece today is your well's production history — with it, the estimate stops being a range built on convention and becomes arithmetic on a decline curve. That's what we're building next. The assumptions behind every number are written down in the open, not hidden in code.
What does it cost?
Nothing. The map, the county filters, the alerts, the monthly digest, and the valuation estimate are free and stay free — they're built on public records, and charging for access to public facts isn't a business we want. If a paid tier ever appears it will be for precision and effort on top of the free version, never for the facts themselves.
What do you do with my email address?
Two things, and we'd rather you hear the second one from us than find it in the fine print. First, we send you the alerts you asked for. Second, we share and sell user information — including your email address — to third parties, and that is how this site stays free to use. Buyers, brokers, and industry data companies pay for it, and that revenue is what pays for a site nobody is charged to use. It's all written out in the Privacy Policy — what we collect, who we sell it to, and how to opt out.

Your exact saved coordinates are the one thing held back unless you specifically agree to it — that's the separate, unticked checkbox on the sign-in form, asked on its own rather than folded into anything else.

You stay in control of both: every email has a one-click unsubscribe that removes you from everything — county watches and dropped pins both — and you can ask us to delete your information at any time.

What we're building next

This site is early and it is being built in the open. Here is what is coming, roughly in the order we expect to get to it.

Where else we're going

Texas first, and Texas properly — there is no sense being shallow in nine states when the people who need this are standing in one. After that, roughly in this order:

  1. New Mexico. The other half of the Permian Basin. The same operators are drilling the same rock a few miles west, and plenty of families already own on both sides of the state line — for a lot of our readers this is not really a new state at all.
  2. Oklahoma. An enormous number of small, inherited mineral interests, and a long history of owners being approached by people who know more than they do. Close enough to Texas in law and custom that most of what this site knows carries over.
  3. North Dakota. The Bakken. Fewer owners, but the interests are valuable and a great many of them belong to people who live somewhere else and inherited ground they have never stood on — which is exactly who has the hardest time judging an offer.
  4. Louisiana. The Haynesville, and a lot of active gas. Louisiana's mineral law genuinely differs from Texas's, so this one is more than switching out a data source — we would rather arrive late and correct than early and confidently wrong.
  5. Colorado. The DJ Basin. Good records, active buyers, and more owners than people expect along the Front Range.
  6. Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio. The Marcellus and Utica. Possibly the largest number of ordinary households holding mineral rights anywhere in the country, and the least served by anything like this.
  7. Wyoming. The Powder River. Strong records, though a large share of the minerals are federally owned, which leaves a smaller pool of private owners to help.

Which one moves up is partly your call. If you own minerals outside Texas, email us and say where — that is the list we sort by, and right now it is a short enough list that one message genuinely moves it.

Tell us what would help

We would rather build the thing you actually need than the thing we guessed at. If something on this site is confusing, missing, or plain wrong — or if there is a number you keep wishing you had — send it to info@ailandvalue.com.

A real person reads every one, and the list above changes because of them. You don't need an account and there is no form to fill out — a sentence is plenty.

Ask a question

A real person reads these. Answers get added to this page, so asking helps whoever comes after you with the same question.