FactRelay Docs
Evidence and Source Standard
What counts as evidence, how cited sources are traced and classified, validity as an attribute, and why opinions are attributed rather than adjudicated.
Findings are only as good as their evidence discipline. This standard governs how FactRelay handles the two evidence directions in every engagement: evidence for your facts (what your company can prove) and evidence behind AI claims (what the assistant cited).
Evidence for approved facts
Every approved fact in the fact registry carries at least one evidence record:
- a public URL or client-authorized document reference;
- capture date and, where applicable, an archived copy or hash;
- the scope it supports (“SOC 2 Type II — cloud product line only”);
- an expiry or review date — certifications lapse, prices change, regions expand.
Facts without evidence remain candidates. Candidates never appear in client-visible conclusions and never justify remediation content.
Evidence validity is an attribute, not a state machine
Evidence carries a validity attribute: valid / expiring / outdated / unreachable. It is deliberately separate from fact status, because the combinations matter:
Fact · Approved + Evidence · Outdated = the fact stands, but its public proof needs updating — a common and fixable situation that a single merged status would hide.
Tracing AI-cited sources
For each load-bearing claim in a sampled answer, we record which cited source supports it and classify that source:
| Classification | Meaning | Typical action |
|---|---|---|
| Current | Version consistent with approved facts | Preserve; keep it crawlable |
| Outdated | Superseded version still being cited | Update at source or publish superseding facts |
| Valid (opinion) | Real opinion, correctly attributed to its author | Leave attributed; publish facts alongside |
| Misused | Real source, claim it doesn’t support | Document the gap; fix extractability of the truth |
| Absent | Claim with no retrievable support | Flag as unsupported; monitor |
When a surface returns no citations, we record exactly that — sources are never invented or inferred.
Opinions are attributed, never adjudicated
A reviewer’s complaint is evidence that the complaint exists — not evidence about your product, and not something we rule true or false. The failure mode we do correct is generalization: one 2023 thread becoming “users report that…”. The fix is factual context published beside the opinion, with the opinion’s attribution preserved. We never draft rebuttals of individual reviewers.
Chain of custody
Every customer-visible conclusion must connect an observed answer, a relevant public source, an approved public statement, a reviewed action, and a recheck. Internal processing records stay private. The public demo case shows this customer-facing chain, while the measurement standard explains the methodology.