Methodology and source policy

Claims are labelled by the strength of the source behind them, not by how confident the sentence sounds. A badge appears on every article and, where a single page mixes evidence levels, on individual sections.

Primary sources first, in this order, and the ordering is not a formality. It decides which of two conflicting statements gets quoted first.

1. Provider documentation, support articles, model cards, and terms that the provider maintains.
2. Official announcements, transparency reports, and regulatory filings.
3. Legislative and standards text: the AI Act articles themselves, the C2PA specification, national standards.
4. Peer-reviewed research, then preprints, with the distinction stated rather than blurred.
5. Credible reporting that does original work, used to locate primaries.
6. Community threads, used as evidence of demand, terminology, and belief. They are never evidence of mechanism.

Some provider domains block automated fetching. Where a claim was retrieved through a text mirror or an archive capture rather than the live page, the page says so instead of implying direct access.

Marketing pages from tools that sell watermark removal are not sources. They are the thing this site exists to check.

Provider watermarking status changes month to month, so an undated claim about it is worthless within a quarter.

• Every page shows a published date and an updated date.
• Volatile provider claims carry a last-verified date, meaning someone opened the primary source on that date and confirmed the wording still says what we say it says.
• When a primary source changes wording, the change itself becomes a fact worth reporting, with both versions where we can evidence them.
• Where an archive capture is the only evidence of a previous wording, that is stated rather than presented as a direct observation.

If a page's last-verified date is old and the topic is fast-moving, treat it as stale and tell us. That is a legitimate correction even when nothing on the page is wrong yet.

Original testing follows the same protocol every time, and the protocol is published with the results rather than described afterwards.

1. State the question and what result would count as evidence either way, before running anything.
2. Record the full configuration: model identifier, interface or API, date, prompt, output length, language, and any sampling settings that were controllable.
3. Publish the aggregated data, and the raw data where it can be released without republishing someone else's copyrighted text.
4. Publish the analysis code, or enough of the procedure that someone else can write it in an afternoon.
5. State the sample size next to every number, including in charts.
6. State the limitations in the same place as the finding, not in a footnote.

Providers contradict themselves and each other, and the contradictions are often the most useful thing on the page.

The rule is to report both sides with their labels and dates, name the source of each, and say plainly that nothing reconciles them. We do not silently pick the more recent one, the more authoritative-sounding one, or the one that makes a cleaner sentence.

Where a contradiction has a plausible resolution that no source confirms (for example, that a consumer app and a developer API behave differently), the hypothesis is stated as a hypothesis.