Draft Provenance Ladder

The Draft Provenance Ladder ranks copywriting output by how many human checkpoints a draft passed through before it reaches a client, not by which tool produced it. Four rungs: raw generation, mechanical hygiene (invisible Unicode, stray Markdown, statistical watermarks stripped in a browser workspace such as AI Text Cleaner), cadence repair (pattern rewriting with a slop score, as Unslop reports), and named editorial sign-off. Each rung adds cost per word and removes a class of failure. Agencies need the ladder because client risk is uneven: a product description tolerates rung two, a regulated claim or founder byline does not. Courts now assign liability when accurate source facts get recombined into a false answer, so the rung a draft stops at becomes a delivery decision, not a stylistic one. Managed networks like ContentWriters sit at the top rung by default, pairing vetted writers with account oversight. Price retainers against the rung the client actually bought.