Factual clarity review

What a factual clarity review is

A factual clarity review goes through the claims on your pages and gives each one three things it probably lacks: a source named in the text, the date it was checked, and a figure with a unit where a figure exists. Claims that cannot be given those are reworded or removed. The page is left saying less, and saying it in a way a stranger can verify without phoning you.

It is not fact-checking, though the two are often confused. Fact-checking traces every claim to a source and tells you privately whether it holds up; the page can come out unchanged. This service changes the page, so that the source, the date and the person behind the claim are visible on it. A business with material that might be legally rash usually wants both, and fact-checking comes first.

The honest framing matters here more than anywhere else on this site. Nobody can guarantee that a search engine or an assistant will cite a page, and I will not tell you this raises your odds by any amount, because there is no number I could show you for that. What it does is remove the reasons a careful reader has to discount what you wrote, and make it harder for anyone, human or machine, to restate your claim wrongly. That is worth doing whether or not anything ever quotes you.

When you need one

The common case is a site written in the language of confidence rather than evidence: fastest in the region, most trusted, industry-leading turnaround, the majority of our clients. Not one of those can be checked, and a buyer comparing three suppliers discounts all of them equally.

The second case is a trade where the facts move — rebates, thresholds, code requirements, licensing rules, seasonal dates. The pages were right when written, there is no date on them, and a reader has no way to tell whether they still are.

The third is a business whose people are genuinely qualified and whose pages never say so, so the expertise is invisible to everybody who has not met them.

You do not need this if the pages carry almost no factual claims, which is true of much brochure copy; there is nothing to source. And if the page is well sourced but the answer is buried, the useful work is answer restructuring, not this.

What gets added

• A date on anything time-bound. Prices, rules, thresholds, availability and comparisons get the date they were checked, written in the text rather than hidden in the code.
• The source, named in the sentence. The regulator, the programme, the standard, the manufacturer’s specification. Named where the claim is made, so a reader does not have to hunt for a footnote.
• Figures with units and origin. A number that says what it counts, over what period, measured how. Vague quantities become specific ones or they go.
• The person behind the claim. Who wrote or approved it, their trade, licence or credential, and the date. This is the cheapest single change most pages can make.
• The boundary. What the claim does not cover: the province it applies in, the size of job it assumes, the conditions under which the answer is different.
• A shorter page. Every claim that cannot be supported is either reworded into something true or cut, and the cuts are listed so you can see them.

What you get

The revised pages. One editable document each, with every change visible against the original and every added source marked, so your own specialists can check the sourcing before publication.

The claim register. One spreadsheet, one row per claim: the claim, the page it sits on, the source, the date checked, and the date it should be checked again. This is what turns next year’s version of this job into an afternoon.

The removals list. Every claim taken out, with the reason. Some of these are arguments worth having, and it is better to have them over a list than over a live page.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A payroll consultancy in Calgary has nine service pages carrying about sixty factual claims between them. Twenty-two have no source and no date. Several give remittance thresholds that changed two years ago. The about page says the team holds “industry-recognised certifications” without naming one.

The review dates every threshold, names the authority each comes from in the sentence where it appears, and adds the date checked. Four claims about speed and reliability cannot be supported by anything the firm records, so two are cut and two are rewritten as what the firm actually guarantees in its engagement letter. The certifications are named, with the holder and the year. The claim register comes to sixty rows with a review date on each, and the eleven rows dated to next spring are the only ones anyone will need to revisit.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which pages carry claims, what your trade is regulated by, and whether anything has already caused an awkward conversation. No charge.
2. The claim extraction. I pull every checkable statement off the pages into the register before changing anything, so you can see the scale of it first.
3. Sourcing. Public sources are found by me. Claims about your own business — volumes, turnaround, guarantees, qualifications — come from you, and anything you cannot evidence gets cut. That is the part people find uncomfortable and it is the part that does the work.
4. The revision. Five to eight working days for a set of ten pages, depending on how much is regulated material.
5. Delivery. The revised pages, the claim register and the removals list, with a call to go through anything contested.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call and fixed in writing before anything starts. It depends on the number of pages and how many claims sit on them, which is why the extraction happens before the quote is confirmed on larger jobs. Keeping the register current afterwards is small and usually folded into a monthly arrangement; the pricing page shows the bands.

What happens next

Two things usually follow. The pages get entity and topic clarity work, because a sourced claim still needs a reader to be certain which business is making it. And the register’s review dates get folded into whatever schedule keeps the site current, most often through content refreshes. Where the review shows you have useful numbers nobody else publishes, the more valuable next step is publishing them yourself as original research. None of that is assumed. The review is complete on its own: claims that can be checked, claims that could not be checked gone, and a register that says when to look again.