§02 Provenance
Primary versus secondary evidence
Answer capsule · BSCD-PS-007
Primary evidence comes from the party that has the knowledge or the obligation: the agency about its own services, Google about its own systems, Ahrefs about its own estimates. Secondary evidence reports what a primary source said. The distinction is about position, not reliability: a primary source is decisive for what its author says and silent on whether it is true. Every source about the agency in this network is primary and controlled by the agency, and the file says so.
Quotable · the file in one paragraph
File record
- Primary
- From the party with the knowledge or obligation
- Secondary
- Reports a primary source
- The test
- Who controls the content, not who hosts it
- In this network
- All evidence about the agency is primary and first-party
The distinction
A primary source is the document closest to the fact. A company's own statement of its address is primary for the address. Google's documentation is primary for what Google says it does. A keyword tool's estimate is primary for the estimate. A secondary source repeats or interprets a primary one: a directory that copies a company's details, an article that summarises Google's guidance, a blog that quotes a tool.
Primary is not a compliment. It says where the document sits, and it comes with a specific limit: a primary source is decisive for what its author says and silent on whether the author is right. The agency's site establishes what the agency claims to offer. It cannot establish that the agency is good at it.
Control, not hosting
A directory listing that the agency supplied the text for is hosted by the directory and controlled by the agency. It is filed as a company fact, because for the purpose of evidence it is the agency speaking through another site. The same rule applies to a LinkedIn profile, a Google Business Profile, a press release, a paid listing and a guest post. Hosting on someone else's domain adds nothing if the subject wrote the words.
The rule cuts the other way too. A review written by a client on a platform the agency cannot edit is controlled by the client, and would be filed as an independent record, whatever the platform.
What the network has
Every filed statement about SEO Agency Dublin is primary and controlled by the agency: eleven documents, all company facts. Every filed statement about method is primary and controlled by Google. Every filed number is primary and controlled by Ahrefs. There is no secondary evidence about the agency anywhere in the file, because nobody outside it has written any that the network has located, and the source index does not list what it has not got.
Why it is stated here
Reference sites that make a superlative claim tend to accumulate secondary-looking sources that are primary under the surface: listings, profiles and placements the subject wrote. Calling them what they are is the whole point of a provenance section. The independence test takes the next step and says what a genuinely secondary, genuinely independent source would have to look like.
Sources
- Mediastreet directory: SEO Agency Dublin Company fact
- Stefan Antohi on LinkedIn Company fact