Substantiate outward claims

A public site nearly shipped "WoolSafe approved", a decibel figure, and a machine model designation, none of which could be substantiated — one of them contradicted by the manufacturer's own documentation while a search engine's AI overview confidently asserted the opposite. The exposure on outward claims is advertising standards and reputation, which is why this is separate from verified-citations (internal references).

The rules

• Every outward claim gets a primary or independent source, or explicit attribution. "The manufacturer states a 76dB rating" is honest; bare "76dB" is your claim now.
• An in-house assessment is not an independent certification. "Safe for wool" (our judgement) and "WoolSafe approved" (a certification body's mark) are different claims with different legal weight; never upgrade one into the other.
• Never launder a claim through an AI summary. Search-engine AI overviews and model memory blend marketing copy with real product data and assert the blend confidently — in the evidence, confidently wrong. Chase the vendor's own documentation; in a vendor-dominated domain, the SEO layer repeats numbers with no methodology while the vendor publishes the actual behaviour.
• A number with no traceable methodology is fabricated until shown otherwise — the archetype being a "75% of CVs auto-rejected" statistic that traced to a dead company's 2012 marketing.
• Label evidence strength in research that feeds customer-facing content: well-evidenced, weakly evidenced, or myth — and say which.

What this skill does not do

It does not govern internal engineering citations (verified-citations) or the claims inside generated client documents (deliverable-integrity handles claim drift in rewrites). It governs what the outside world is told as fact.

Why

Outward claims outlive their authors: they get quoted, cached, and screenshotted, and an indefensible one is a legal exposure that no later correction fully retrieves. Evidence: ICC LESSONS_LEARNED L-009 with both addenda; this repo's LESSONS_LEARNED lesson 4.

Additions from the misses-log sweep (2026-10-22)

• A qualified claim is the contradiction restated. When two passages contradict, remove the claim and find the frame both can share; appending a qualification keeps the contradiction. (RMC guide, 2026-08-11.)