A topic heading with nothing under it
A rival’s help centre lists a topic called Kiosk, and opening it says no items found. Whether that is their site saying they sell one decides a cell.
On Saturday we read every page of one rival’s site as text, all 119 addresses in their sitemap, to settle eleven blank cells in their column of our comparison table. A blank means their own site does not say. The hardest cell to settle was the kiosk, because their help centre has a topic called Kiosk, and if you open it the page reads No items found. Two other topics, one for face-to-face ordering and one for a handheld product, read the same way. The question was whether a heading with nothing under it is the site saying something.
What a heading is evidence of
A help-centre topic is created by somebody on their team, so it is evidence that the word kiosk crossed their mind. That is all it is evidence of. A topic can be made for a product that is planned, a product that was sold once and withdrawn, a product sold under a partner’s name, or a category that was set up when the help centre was and never filled. None of those is a sentence a buyer can rely on. The word appears nowhere else on the 119 pages: not on a feature page, not in a case study, not in pricing. If they sold a kiosk, the pages that sell things would say so.
So the cell stayed blank, and the comment beside the row in our source records the three empty topics and why they did not count. The rule we applied is the same one a tick needs: a company says it does something when a page describes doing it. A navigation label is not a description. An empty category is a label with nothing attached.
Why this matters more than one cell
The pull in a comparison is always towards filling the blank. A blank looks like we did not do our homework, and a tick or a cross looks like an answer. But a tick written from an empty heading would be a claim we could not point to, and a cross would be a guess about what they cannot do, which is the mistake the dash exists to prevent. The honest state is the uncomfortable one: we looked at every page, we found the word once, and once was not a sentence.
If you are reading a supplier’s help centre to work out what they sell, the same test works for you. Count the articles, not the headings. A topic with twelve articles under it is a product people have needed help with. A topic with none is a word somebody typed into a menu.