Claim Provenance Ratio

Claim Provenance Ratio measures the share of statements in a deliverable that trace to a named, checkable source versus the share that rest on model fluency alone. Agencies that track this ratio can price the editorial layer honestly: a 40-post retainer where 90% of claims carry citations supports a different fee than one where 60% are unverifiable. The ratio also predicts client risk. When AI assistants cite sources rather than rankings, an unverified claim that a competitor's page outranks yours becomes a liability the client discovers in a prompt audit, not a ranking report. ContentIQ's approach of retrieving sources, testing each claim, and discarding unsupported ones is one operational expression of the ratio. WriteRush and Rytr compress drafting time but leave provenance work to the operator. The framework's discipline: before any AI-assisted draft reaches a client, count the claims and count the sources, then decide whether the gap is billable research or unpaid risk.