Every article on this blog opens with a card of the checks it went through. This page explains what each line counts and where its number comes from.
Method version 1 · October 2026
Example · from one article
What was checked before publishingAvoid Content Team · Oct 13, 2026 Seven steps run by our pipeline, then read by an editor.
Angles the top pages miss, covered here
Competitors cover low-stakes errors but not high-stakes regulated or technical fields
Competitors outline editorial steps but give no granular procedure: primary-source cross-checks, citation criteria
The reader's question
How can content marketing teams effectively fact-check and verify AI-generated text to ensure accuracy and maintain brand trust?
Sources kept
U.S. District Court, S.D.N.Y. (via CourtListener): Mata v. Avianca, Inc., No. 22-cv-1461 (PKC), Opinion and Order on Sanctions, S.D.N.Y., June 22, 2023
The Guardian: Air Canada ordered to pay customer who was misled by airline’s chatbot
CNET (editors’ note on its own engine): CNET Is Testing an AI Engine. Here’s What We’ve Learned, Mistakes and All
Associated Press: Deloitte Australia to partially refund $290,000 report filled with suspected AI-generated errors
NPR: How an AI-generated summer reading list got published in major newspapers
NPR: Google’s AI chatbot, Bard, sparks a $100 billion loss in Alphabet shares
arXiv (OpenAI, Georgia Tech): Why Language Models Hallucinate
arXiv / Journal of Legal Analysis: Large Legal Fictions: Profiling Legal Hallucinations in Large Language Models
How
Each number in the text links to the page it came from, in the same paragraph.
“When models are graded only on accuracy, they are encouraged to guess rather than say ‘I don’t know.'”“when models are graded only on accuracy, the percentage of questions they get exactly right, they are encouraged to guess rather than say ‘I don’t know.'”Source: openai.com/index/why-language-models-hallucinate
Corrected before → after
Negligent misrepresentation; Air Canada was ordered to pay the fare difference. → Air Canada was held responsible and ordered to pay the fare difference.
with a small number requiring substantial correction”; the plagiarism checker had also missed borrowed sentences → with a small number requiring substantial correction”; borrowed sentences had also got past the plagiarism check
Chicago Public Media said it is “unacceptable for any content we provide to our readers to be inaccurate” and opened an investigation. → Chicago Public Media said it is “unacceptable for any content we provide to our readers to be inaccurate” and said it was investigating.
The error shipped inside the advertisement and social media users spotted it immediately → The error shipped inside the advertisement and social media users quickly pointed it out
“When models are graded only on accuracy, they are encouraged to guess rather than say ‘I don’t know.'” → “when models are graded only on accuracy, the percentage of questions they get exactly right, they are encouraged to guess rather than say ‘I don’t know.'”
Scored by
Our search and AI-answer checks, the same ones every client article runs through. Scale on How we check.
Final checks
All 9 cited pages opened on Oct 13, 2026
No stock phrasing left in the text
EDEditorAvoid Content TeamRead the whole article before it went live
The first line of the card is the short version. Sources cited says how many of the pages gathered for the article it names. Claims checked and corrected say how many factual claims were opened on their source, and how many were changed to match it.
The seven steps
On an article, open the card and each step says what it did and what came out of it. Numbers vary with each article’s topic and brief.
Top results read We read the pages that rank at the top of search for the reader’s question and compare what they cover. Read counts the ranking pages read in full. The line names the angles those pages miss or barely touch that this article covers.
Brief The brief starts from one sentence: the question this article answers for its reader. The line counts the sections and the reader questions the article answers.
SourcesPulled counts the distinct pages gathered for the reader’s question. Kept counts the ones worth citing, which the article names in its Sources list, and how many of them are primary: research papers, court records, laws, official pages, a survey publisher’s own report. A news report about someone else’s work is cited, but not counted as primary.
Draft Every figure in the text links to its source in the same paragraph. Our own measurements are labelled as ours.
Fact-checkClaims checked counts every quotation, figure and attributed fact, each opened on its source page on the date shown. A quotation passes only if it appears there word for word. Corrected counts the claims we changed because the source said something else, taken from the article’s edit history. One correction is shown under this step, as it was and as it is now.
Line edit An editor reads the draft line by line. The line counts the phrases from our list of machine-typical wording that were in the first draft and are gone from the final text.
Final checks The last checks before the article goes live: every cited page opens and every source is named.
Editor An editor of the Avoid Content Team reads every article whole before it goes live, and signs this last row.
What the card does not say
The card is a record of work, with limits worth stating.
The card counts
The card does not promise
What was checked, on the date shown
That a source never changes after that date
Facts: quotations, figures, attributed claims
That our opinions are right. They are labelled as ours
The work done on this article
A grade of its quality
Why there is no grade
We do not grade our own articles.
A grade we gave ourselves would always be the top one. So it would tell you nothing.
The card shows the work and what came out of it instead, and every number on it can be checked against the article.
After publication
We re-open the sources of published articles. When a fact has changed at its source, we update the article, and the card says how many facts changed and when we last checked.
Found an error?
Write to us through the contact form. We check it against the source, correct the article, and the card records the change.