A number about somebody else has a date on it
Our comparison post said a rival had twenty-seven case studies. Their sitemap now lists twenty-eight. The claim carried a date, so the re-read was the job.
One of our comparison posts makes two checkable claims about a rival: how many named customer case studies their site carries, and that nothing on it describes rotas, stock or labour. Both were true when the post was written in August and both were re-checked in September. On Thursday we read their sitemap again. The case-study count had moved from twenty-seven to twenty-eight.
Nothing about the argument changed. One more event case study makes the point the post was making, which is that their proof is named customers at festivals and ours is one food hall we run ourselves. But the sentence twenty-seven case studies was now wrong, and it sat in two places on a page that asks readers to trust it over a rival’s own marketing.
Why the post could be corrected in ten minutes
Because every claim about another company on our site carries the date it was read. The footer of that post said: read on 15 August, re-read on 13 September, both numbers checked again on that date. A dated claim tells the reader how old the figure is, and it tells us when the figure is due another look. A claim with no date is one the reader has to take on trust and one nobody is ever reminded to check.
The footer now names three dates and says what the October check covered: all 83 addresses in their sitemap, and the text of their home, about and four vertical pages read for the words rota, stocktake, inventory, payroll and clocking in. None appear. The second claim holds on a stronger measure than the September check used, which only looked at addresses.
What was deliberately left alone
Our comparison table has a column for the same rival with twenty feature cells in it, and its own read date. That date did not move. Thursday’s read covered a sitemap and six pages, not twenty cells about ordering, payments and reporting. Re-dating a column is a claim to have read every cell, and we had not. The next post explains why that rule exists.
The habit is cheap and the alternative is not. A number about somebody else is a fact with a shelf life. Write the date beside it, and when the date is old, go and look again before anyone else does.