Region‐specific empirically based ground‐truth (EBGT) criteria used to estimate the epicentral‐location accuracy of seismic events have been developed for the Main Ethiopian Rift and the Tibetan plateau. Explosions recorded during the Ethiopia–Afar Geoscientific Lithospheric Experiment (EAGLE), the International Deep Profiling of Tibet, and the Himalaya (INDEPTH III) experiment provided the necessary GT0 reference events. In each case, the local crustal structure is well known and handpicked arrival times were available, facilitating the establishment of the location accuracy criteria through the stochastic forward modeling of arrival times for epicentral locations. In the vicinity of the Main Ethiopian Rift, a seismic event is required to be recorded on at least 8 stations within the local bed/inline-graphic-1.gif" /> crossover distance and to yield a network‐quality metric of less than 0.43 in order to be classified as EBGT5