Source Verification Gate (QA)

Source Verification Gate (QA)

1. 01

   Freeze the claim list before any drafting begins

   Have the account lead extract every statistic, date, named customer, and performance number the client wants in the piece, then mark each one as client-supplied, third-party, or unverified.

2. 02

   Route unverified claims through a retrieval pass that discards what it cannot support

   ContentIQ retrieves sources and tests each claim before writing, dropping anything unsupported; treat that discard behavior as the standard, not a nice-to-have, on regulated accounts.

3. 03

   Confirm the client's own data room is the first stop for proprietary numbers

   Ask for the dashboard export, the closed-won report, or the signed case study PDF rather than accepting a number that only exists in a previous draft.

4. 04

   Check whether the client's category question now surfaces in AI answers at all

   Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity the core question the client's top-ranking page answers, then log whether the client or a competitor gets cited; page-one rank no longer guarantees inclusion.

5. 05

   Run a plagiarism and near-duplicate scan against the client's own published archive

   Rytr ships a plagiarism check inside its writing flow, and the same pass catches self-cannibalization when a retainer client has published 200 posts over three years.

6. 06

   Attach the sources panel to the draft before it leaves the agency

   Every retained claim gets a link, a publication date, and the name of the person who verified it, so a client-side legal reviewer can audit the piece without a call.

7. 07

   Record the discard log and bill the verification hours as a named line item

   The claims you killed are the evidence that the editorial layer exists; a line item called source verification is defensible at renewal in a way that a generic content retainer is not.