Twenty years of increases. Easy to type. Surprisingly easy to get wrong. Every dividend claim you read online deserves ten seconds of verification, and a dividend history lookup app makes the check faster than the lie.
The job is simple. Type a ticker, see the multi-year dividend history by stock, every annual payout for as far back as the data goes. You're looking for two things. One: the streak, consecutive years of increases, unbroken. Two: the shape. Was the growth steady, or did the dividend flatline for a decade and then jump? A flatline followed by a jump isn't the same as twenty years of steady raises, even when both get marketed as a streak. The shape tells you about the culture. The number alone doesn't.
This is the app you open before every buy, not after. Ten seconds. It kills more bad ideas than any screener I know. The stocks that never cut their dividend are rare, and the claim gets made about stocks that don't qualify far more often than you'd think. Trust the data, not the headline. Headlines are written to be clicked.
For the famous lists, a dividend aristocrats and kings database search tool does the same verification at the list level. When a blog says a company just joined the aristocrats, check the streak yourself. Lists get copied from lists, errors compound, and by the third copy nobody remembers where the number came from. I've found wrong streaks on sites I'd otherwise trust. It happens.
One limitation to know: free history apps sometimes show only a few years back. A streak claim needs the full history. If the app caps at five years, it can't verify a 25-year claim, and it shouldn't pretend to. Check the depth before you trust the verdict.
For full streaks, payout ratios, and yields in one place, the dividend income planner at dividenddb.fyi keeps the complete history for 197 payers.