Fact Verification and Source Audit: Which Claims on Your Site Can Be Backed Up?

Every website makes claims. "Most customers see results in 30 days." "The industry's fastest turnaround." "Over 60 percent of searches end without a click." Some are true, some were true once, and some came from a half-remembered article. When an AI system or a careful reader meets a claim with no evidence behind it, it has to decide whether to trust it, and the safer choice is often to ignore it.

A fact verification and source audit sorts your claims into the ones you can stand behind and the ones you can't.

Step 1: pick the pages that matter

Start with pages that carry weight: service pages, pricing, case studies, comparison pages, data-heavy blog posts, and anything related to health, money or law. Those are where unsupported claims do the most harm.

Step 2: extract the claims

Read each page and highlight every sentence that makes a factual claim. Put them in a table.

Claim	Type	Has a source?	Date shown?	Verified?
"Reduces load time by 40%"	Result	No	No
"Over 2,000 clients since 2015"	Company fact	Internal	Partly
"Most users abandon slow sites"	Statistic	No	No
"Google uses X as a ranking factor"	Third-party	No	No

Step 3: classify each one

Type	What to look for
Your own numbers	Do you have records that support it, and does the date still apply?
Third-party statistics	Is there a named source, a year and a working link?
Statements about other companies or products	Are they accurate and current?
Absolute words	"always", "never", "best", "guaranteed": can you really back them?
Time-sensitive facts	Prices, laws, features, versions: when were they last checked?

Step 4: verify

For each claim, try to find the original source rather than a blog that repeats it. If a statistic traces back to a survey from 2017, say so, or find something more recent. If your own number came from one project, say "in one client project" rather than implying a general rule.

Also check whether your own pages disagree. Two different prices for the same service on two pages is a verification failure of its own.

Step 5: add evidence in the text

For a supported claim, write the source into the sentence:

• Before: "Most users abandon slow sites."
• After: "In a 2018 Google study, the probability of a visitor leaving rose by 32 percent as load time went from one second to three."

Include the organisation, the year and what was measured. Add a link to the original where you can. Make sure the page shows when it was last reviewed.

Step 6: fix or remove what you can't support

Options, in order of preference:

1. Replace it with a better-sourced number
2. Rewrite it as an honest, narrower statement
3. Label it as your own experience or estimate
4. Delete it

Step 7: schedule rechecks

Facts age. Put a review date on pages with numbers and check them once or twice a year. The freshness signals post covers keeping dates honest.

Common mistakes

• Citing a source that doesn't say what you claim it says.
• Linking to a page that cites another page that cites nothing.
• Hiding source details in a footnote that nobody will find.
• Treating a competitor's blog post as primary evidence.

A site where claims are specific, dated and sourced is simply easier to believe.

Further reading: Google's fact check markup guide and Google's guidance on creating helpful, reliable content are good places to check the details straight from the source.