What is recorded for every figure
A figure that cannot fill in all of these does not get published as a statement of fact.
- The claim — one atomic fact, not a sentence.
- The source, linked, and whether it is the vendor's own live page or a third party.
- The source's own date — the date it carries, not the date it was found.
- The date it was read, because these figures move within a year.
- A short exact quote, kept for checking. It is never published as prose.
- A status, from the four below.
The four statuses
| Status | Meaning | How the page treats it |
|---|---|---|
agreed | Two or more independent sources match | Stated plainly, citing each |
conflict | Sources disagree | The disagreement is the content. Both shown; neither averaged away |
stale | Contradicted by the vendor's current live page | Dropped, or shown as superseded with both dates |
single-source | Only one source carries it | Attributed in-line to that source, never stated flatly as fact |
Where the sources come from
Originals only. A figure enters a page from the document that first published it — the vendor's own help page, the report itself — never from someone else's write-up of it. Secondary coverage is read for context and is never the origin of a number.
That distinction does most of the work. Ten articles quoting one report are one source, and counting them as ten is how a figure ends up on a hundred pages with nobody having read where it came from.
Pages are drafted from the matrix rather than from source prose, which is what makes reproducing anyone's wording structurally impossible instead of something to be policed afterwards. A page also never mirrors one source's vendor set or ordering.
What is recorded when the answer is "we don't know"
Each matrix carries a section for what was looked for and not found, and for figures that could not be checked. A number with no distribution behind it, or a ranking whose gaps are inside the noise, is hedged on the page rather than presented as a finding.
Why there are no scores
No star ratings and no marks out of ten. A score folds a dozen separate judgements into one number and hides every one of them, so two products with the same score can be wrong for you in completely different ways.
Every number on this site came from a document someone else published, and the page names which one. That is a stronger claim than a rating, because you can go and check it.
The matrices behind the current pages
Generated from the evidence folder when the site is built, so it always matches the record rather than describing it from memory.
| Page | Sources | Claims |
|---|---|---|
| What does AI actually do in email marketing? | 20 | 48 |
When something is wrong
Corrections are handled under the corrections policy, which covers what gets fixed, how quickly, and how the change is shown on the page afterwards.