For boards

Evidence quality is a board-level concern.

A board is not the operator. It cannot inspect every system that produced a record. What it can do — and what the Evidence Economy increasingly rewards — is govern the discipline by which records are produced, attributed and published. When discovery and evaluation systems synthesise answers about the organisation from its published record, the board is the party accountable for the state of that record.[S2-SEO-AI]

This is a governance question, not a marketing question. The existence of an Operator Gap — the distance between what the organisation claims and what its delivery records say — is within a board's remit to examine. Read the Operator Gap definition.

Six lines of inquiry.

1. What machine-readable records does the organisation currently publish, and at which URLs?
2. Which of the organisation's substantive claims — services, outcomes, capacities — resolve to a specific record of delivery?
3. Who attributes the records — is authorship attached, or are the records anonymous outputs?
4. Are records dated, and are the dates trustworthy?
5. How long is a record expected to remain at its URL, and who is responsible for it if it moves?
6. What would an outside party — a journalist, a regulator, a language model — find if they went looking for evidence of a claim we make in public?

Sources

See the full sources register →