Standards
Editorial Standard
What AIOFacts will cite, in what order of preference, and the rules that govern how a source becomes a published claim. This is the standard the Editorial Method applies.
The hierarchy
Eight tiers, strongest first.
When sources at different tiers disagree, the higher tier is preferred and the disagreement is recorded. A claim is never written at a strength above its best available source.
- Official platform documentationWhat the operator of a system publishes about its own behavior: developer docs, help centers, product announcements, published policy. Highest weight, because the party being described is the party writing it. Still bounded: documentation describes intent and can lag behavior.
- Published standardsFormal specifications from standards bodies and their maintainers, including schema.org vocabularies, W3C specifications, and the published conventions governing crawler directives.
- Peer-reviewed researchWork published through academic peer review. Cited with its scope, sample, and date, because a controlled finding is not automatically a live platform behavior.
- Original datasets with disclosed methodsIndustry studies that publish their method, sample, and collection period so a reader can judge them. A study that will not disclose its method is treated as a marketing claim, whatever its sample size.
- Named expert analysisAnalysis attributed to an identified person with a checkable record in the field. Weight follows the argument and the evidence shown, not the size of the audience.
- Reputable reportingJournalism from outlets with editorial standards and published corrections. Useful for events and disclosures, weaker for mechanism.
- Practitioner observationWhat people working in the field report seeing. Genuinely informative about what is happening in the wild, and never sufficient on its own to establish that a system works a particular way.
- Unverified assertionA claim in circulation with nothing behind it. Recorded only when the circulation itself is the point, and labelled Unverified. Never restated as fact.
The rules
How a source becomes a claim.
What AIOFacts does
- Prefer primary sources. Go to the document itself rather than to an article describing it.
- Link to the exact supporting material. The specific page or section, not a site homepage and not a search result.
- Record access or publication dates. Platform behavior changes, so an undated citation is an incomplete one.
- Distinguish evidence from interpretation. What the source says and what AIOFacts concludes from it are written as separate statements.
- Bound the scope. Name the platform, the surface, and the period a claim applies to.
What AIOFacts does not do
- Cite itself as proof. One AIOFacts page is never the evidence for another AIOFacts claim. Internal links are navigation, not citation.
- Use AIOInsights scores as evidence of universal platform behavior. AIOInsights evaluates observable signals published by a specific site. It does not measure what AI systems do in general, and its output is not used here to support claims about them.
- Use AI-generated summaries as primary evidence. A model's summary is a pointer to a source, never the source.
- Invent certainty where platform behavior is unknown. Where the mechanism is not documented and not observable, the page says so.
- Accept payment for a conclusion. No sponsored entries, no paid inclusion, no affiliate links.
The gate
What a page must clear to be indexed.
Publication and indexing are separate decisions. A page can exist on this site and still be excluded from the sitemap and marked noindex, follow until it passes the source audit.
To be listed in the sitemap and left indexable, a reference page must:
- carry one of the six evidence labels near its primary claim,
- cite at least one external source at tier five or above, linked to the exact material,
- state the date its sources were accessed or published,
- contain no universal claim about AI systems that its sources do not support, and
- have been read end to end by a person against those sources.
Pages that do not clear the gate are kept, not deleted, and are marked noindex, follow and removed from the sitemap until they do. As of 2026-07-23, that applies to every entry in the Source Library: these were produced from templates and from automated drafts without external citation, and none of them currently meets this standard. They remain readable, and they are being audited in order rather than discarded.
Automatic publication is paused. Nothing is added to the library on a schedule, and no new entry goes live without passing this gate.
- Page
- Editorial Standard
- Version
- 1.0
- Published
- 2026-07-23
- Last revised
- 2026-07-23
- Revision notes
- First publication.
- Editor
- Mike Millett, Digilu
- Publisher
- Digilu
- Cite as
AIOFacts, "Editorial Standard", version 1.0, Digilu, 2026-07-23, https://aiofacts.com/editorial-standard/
Hold us to it
Found a claim that does not meet this standard?
Report it. Material errors are corrected in public, with the original wording, the change, the date, the reason, and the source kept on the record.