Check Claims

---
name: check-claims
description: Trace every claim in a piece to a research record or a product fact — proof presence lives here. Unsourced claims are listed, never shipped, never auto-killed; they escalate to the chief. TRIGGER when fact-checking a draft, verifying claims and proof, or when the Fact Checker loads it for the check-the-claims stage. DO NOT TRIGGER for whether the reader believes the claim (buyer-review), for the CTA path (cro-review), or for genericness (check-ai-writing).
---

# Check the claims

One Process: every claim in the piece resolves to a research record or an owner-stated fact, or it is listed for the chief. This pass owns proof PRESENCE — is the claim backed — not whether the reader finds it believable (that is buyer-review), and it resolves copy claims to research records, never landscape quote authenticity (check-reality owns that split's definition). The Fact Checker runs independent of the writers and the chief.

A claim is a statement of fact the copy could assert; opinions, style, and standard action copy (a plain "Start free" CTA asserts no fact) are not claims. Its two homes are the research thread folders (`research/<subject>/`) and the owner-fact and product files (`Business.md`, `Founder.md`, and the product files under `research/product/` (`problems.md`, `features.md`, `processes.md`)).

Resolve every claim to the specific record that carries it, never a line number and never a whole-evidence scan. A record is one of two things:
- A research record in a `research/<subject>/` topic file — a verbatim buyer or competitor quote, or an observed page fact, carrying its full URL and its source and capture dates.
- A statement in an owner-fact or product file — `Business.md`, `Founder.md`, or a product file under `research/product/`. Owner facts are first-class proof and stand on their own.

Read the record and confirm it carries the words the claim asserts — a record that does not carry them does not resolve the claim. Offer facts (guarantee, trial, prices) appear verbatim from the owner-fact files or not at all.

A claim resolves and stands, or it is unsourced — LISTED and escalated to the chief, never killed by this pass and never shipped as-is. Two claim categories route further:
- Insufficient or contradicted by the records → the claim cannot ship as written; the writer rewrites the piece without it, or the chief escalates to the owner for a fact that would source it.
- Founder-biographical first-person claim ("I did/stopped/ran X") → resolvable ONLY by the owner's endorsement, recorded via record-decision.

Fabrication is never a fallback — never a fake number, testimonial, or customer name.

## 1. Resolve every claim to a record

### Trace every fact to its source
Product, offer, founder, competitor — every claim resolves to a research record or an owner-stated fact that carries it. Where records conflict, record the winning source or the explicit "insufficient / contradicted".
Never: invented founder workdays, fake customers ("Jane paid again in May"), competitor behavior absent from the records.

### Hold the claim's wording to its evidence state
A claim's wording may not exceed the state its evidence records. If the fact is "the report updates once a day," the copy may not say "updates in real time" — the stronger word claims a state the evidence does not hold.

### Hold a claim to its evidence's scope
Evidence backs a claim only at the scope it covers. One customer report may not become a market-wide indictment — a single "the app logged me out twice this week" does not back "the app is unreliable." A cross-competitor synthesis may not become "no alternative can do X." Internal product documents substantiate the writer, never presented as buyer-facing proof.
Never: inflating one buyer report into a claim about the whole market, a competitor sweep into "no alternative can do X," or a code fact into buyer-facing proof.

### Back an absolute quantifier at its own scope or scope it down
An absolute quantifier claims across a whole set — "every", "always", "everyone else", "definitive" — and stands only on evidence at that full scope, or it is scoped down to what the evidence holds. Two competitor facts and one documented failure back a claim about those competitors and that failure, never the category. The quantifier is where an in-scope fact silently inflates into a category verdict.

## 2. List the unsourced

### List every unsourced claim, kill nothing yourself
An unsourced claim is a finding for the chief, not a line you delete and not a line you fabricate backing for. It never auto-kills and never ships as-is.

## 3. Check the timeline and the closes

### Claim only events on the product's own timeline
The claimable timeline starts where the product acts. Pre-product events take attribution verbs only — tie and credit, never "run". A close names a standing property of a product-run page; it never rescues the scene's own past artifact.
State honest limits plainly, in the same breath as the claim they bound — the admission is proof, not fine print. The full timeline, close, and event-ownership rules: [references/claims-and-closes.md](references/claims-and-closes.md).

Verification: every claim in the piece resolved to a research record or an owner-stated fact, or listed as unsourced; every unsourced claim escalated to the chief, none fabricated, none silently shipped.