Claims policy
What we will and will not say
This is a policy, not a disclaimer. It states the language each verification tier permits us to use, and the claims we refuse to make at any tier. Hold us to it. If you find a report, a page, or a sales conversation that breaks a rule below, that is a defect and we will correct it.
1. Three tiers, and the tier is always published
Every check declares the tier it belongs to, in the product and in your report. The tier determines the words we are allowed to use about its result. We do not average tiers into a single score, because a single score would let advisory judgement borrow the credibility of a deterministic check.
Deterministic
Same input, same verdict, every time — no model in the loop. This is the only tier where the word “verified” is literally true.
- Permits
- “Verified.” The check ran, the verdict is reproducible, and the report shows the input it ran against.
- Forbids
- Verified is a statement about the check, not about your legal position. It never becomes “compliant”.
Bounded
Formal reasoning over a bounded policy. Sound only for what the policy models, so we say “checked against”, never “guaranteed”.
- Permits
- “Checked against policy X.” Sound for what the policy models, and the report names the policy.
- Forbids
- Never “guaranteed”, never “fully checked”. Anything the policy does not model is not covered and we say so.
Advisory
Model judgement. Genuinely useful for direction, never used as a pass/fail gate.
- Permits
- “Advisory score”, labelled as advisory wherever it appears.
- Forbids
- Never a pass, never a fail, never a gate, never cited as evidence that something is correct.
The catalogue at /checks shows the tier of every published check.
2. “Checked against”, never “guaranteed”
A verification result is a statement about an input and a rule. It is not a prediction about a regulator, a plaintiff, or a search engine. The words “guaranteed”, “ensures compliance”, “fully compliant”, and “risk-free” do not appear in our reports, our contracts, or our marketing, and no one here is authorised to use them on our behalf.
The most rigorous automated-reasoning product on the market states that a valid result guarantees validity only for the parts of the input captured by its policy variables. Anyone claiming more than that is overclaiming, ourselves included.
3. Four claims we will not make at any tier
We do not certify ADA or WCAG conformance
No vendor can. There is no Department of Justice web regulation under ADA Title III to conform to, and no regulator certifies a tool. We say a change reduces litigation exposure, and only where the change actually does that. The Federal Trade Commission imposed a $1M fine and a twenty-year order on an accessibility vendor for the sentence we refuse to write.
We do not claim ranking outcomes
We do not promise positions, traffic, or an “E-E-A-T score”. E-E-A-T is a human-rater calibration concept, not an algorithmic signal; scoring it would be folklore with a number attached. Where we report visibility, we report what we measured, with the sample count and the interval.
We do not claim revenue causation
A marketing change and a revenue change are two measurements, not a cause and an effect. We will show you a sealed before-and-after of what we changed and the outcome we measured alongside it. We will not tell you the first produced the second.
A missing provenance manifest proves nothing
Content-provenance signature validation is deterministic: a valid manifest is a fact. Absence is not. Manifests are routinely stripped by ordinary publishing pipelines, so no conclusion about authorship — human or machine — follows from a missing one. We will not ship logic that infers it, and we will not report it as a finding.
4. Sourcing
- Every finding cites a source and a date.
- A rule carries the verbatim text of what it enforces, the citation, and the date that text was last checked. Both appear in your report.
- A rule without a source does not run.
- Rules pending confirmation of their source text are held out of the pack. They are not listed in the catalogue and they cannot produce a finding.
- Anything we cannot source, we do not ship.
- That applies to rules, to figures in reports, and to the claims on this website.
5. What this policy does not do
It is not legal advice, and it does not make us your lawyer. A passing report is evidence that specific checks passed on a specific date against specific inputs. Whether your marketing is lawful is a question for your counsel, working from that evidence rather than instead of it.
Last reviewed 2026-09-07. Changes to this policy are versioned and dated.