Fact-checking

What fact-checking is

Fact-checking is the systematic verification of every checkable statement in a document: each figure, date, name, title, place, quotation, product detail and claim about the world, traced to a source that supports it. The result is a record of what is supported and by what, and a list of what is not. It answers one question about a document before it goes out: if someone challenges a line of this, can we show where it came from?

It is not proofreading, which finds errors of typing, or copyediting, which finds errors of language. A document can be perfectly spelled and grammatical and wrong. Nor is it a pre-publication review, which is broader and looks at permissions, links and legal exposure as well; the two are often bought together.

Who this is for

Any business that publishes claims under its own name and would be embarrassed, or worse, to be shown wrong. A white paper with market figures in it. An industry report you want journalists to cite. A website that states how many clients, how many years, how many countries. A case study with a customer's numbers in it. A slide deck for investors. A press statement. An article ghostwritten under an executive's name, where a wrong fact is their wrong fact.

It is also for the business that has inherited content: a site or a document library written over years by people who have left, full of figures nobody can now source. A check tells you which pages you can stand behind and which to fix or take down.

It is not for opinion, and it is not for the future. A fact-checker cannot verify "we believe" or "we will". Nor is it legal review: I can tell you a competitor claim is unsourced; your lawyer tells you whether it is actionable.

What gets looked at

Every checkable statement, and I decide what counts as checkable by asking whether a reader could reasonably say "prove it". In a typical business document that is between one and three statements per paragraph.

• Numbers. Every figure, percentage, currency amount, date, duration and count. Traced to the document or dataset it came from, with the date of that source recorded, because a figure that was true in 2022 is a different claim in 2026.
• Names and titles. People, companies, products, places, laws, standards. Spelled as the owner spells them; titles as currently held, not as they were when the draft was started.
• Quotations. Wording checked against the original, attribution confirmed, context confirmed. A quotation that says the opposite in full is flagged.
• Claims about the business. "Serving clients since", "the largest in", "the only". Each one checked against what you can document. "Only" and "first" are checked hardest, because they are the ones that get challenged.
• Claims about others. Anything said about a competitor, a regulator, a supplier or a customer. Sourced or flagged, without exception.
• Internal consistency. A figure stated twice is checked against itself. The company's founding year on page two matches the one on page nine.

I check against primary sources where they exist: the original study, the filing, the standard, the person. A claim that can only be traced to another website repeating it is recorded as unverified, not as verified, because a chain of repetition is not a source.

What you get

The verification log. One spreadsheet, one row per checked statement: the statement as written, its location, the source found, the source's date, the status (verified, verified with a correction, unverified, contradicted) and a note. For a 5,000-word white paper this typically runs to 80 to 150 rows. It is the document you keep, and it is what you hand to whoever asks "where did this come from" in a year's time.

The marked document. Your draft with each statement colour-coded by status and, where a source supports a slightly different figure or wording, the correction proposed in place. Every mark carries a text label as well, so the coding survives printing in black and white.

The summary. One page. How many statements were checked, how many stood, which ones did not and what I recommend for each: correct, source it, soften it, or remove it. The summary is written so it can be forwarded to whoever has to approve publication.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A commercial HVAC company has a 14-page white paper, written by a contractor, on energy costs in mid-sized warehouses, and wants to send it to 400 facility managers. The fact-check logs 112 checkable statements. Ninety-one stand as written. Nine are verified with a correction: a figure quoted from a government energy agency is right but three years old, and the current edition gives a different number; a standard is cited by its old designation; a named product has been renamed.

Twelve are unverified or contradicted. Six statistics trace only to other blog posts repeating each other, with no original study anywhere. One quotation attributed to a named engineer cannot be found in anything that engineer published. Two claims that the company is "the only" provider of a service in the province are contradicted by two other providers' websites. The company drops the six untraceable statistics and the quotation, changes "the only" to "one of few", and updates the nine corrections. The paper that goes out is two paragraphs shorter and every line of it can be defended.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What the document is, who will read it, what claims worry you, and what sources you already have. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Based on length and on the density of claims, agreed before I start.
3. You send the draft and the sources. Whatever the writer used, in whatever state. Missing sources are not a problem; finding them is the job.
4. The check. One statement at a time, logged as I go. One to two weeks for a document under 6,000 words; heavily statistical documents take longer.
5. Delivery and a call. The log, the marked document and the summary, then half an hour on the items that need a decision from you.

What it costs

Fact-checking is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. The price depends on the length of the document and, more than anything, on how many checkable claims it contains and how hard they are to trace: a page of company history is quick, a page of market statistics with no citations is not. The pricing page explains how it is quoted.

What happens next

The corrections go in, and the document usually goes for a proofread before release. If the log showed that most of your figures were repeated from other people's pages, the fix for the next document is to build it on sources from the start, which is what research summaries and industry reports are for. And if the check turned up claims about competitors or quotations without permission, a pre-publication review looks at the rest of the risk in one pass.