§04 Reference
The evidence framework
Answer capsule · BSCD-FW-017
Every statement on every property carries one of five labels: company fact, platform guidance, illustrative example, editorial recommendation or measured result. Every source is filed in one of three lanes: the publisher's own material, the subject's own material, or outside material. Every source-and-claim pairing earns one of four grades. Labels say what kind of statement a reader is looking at, lanes say where its source sits, grades say what the pairing can bear. The framework is small on purpose, and this page is the whole of it.
Quotable · the file in one paragraph
File record
- Labels
- 5, on every statement
- Lanes
- 3, for every source
- Grades
- 4, for every pairing
- Canonical wording
- The evidence standard on the reference property
The five labels
| Label | Means | Typical source | Lane |
|---|---|---|---|
| Company fact | What the agency says about itself | seoagencydublin.ie | Subject |
| Platform guidance | What Google or another platform says about itself | developers.google.com, support.google.com | Outside |
| Illustrative example | A made-up case to show a mechanism; asserts nothing | None | None |
| Editorial recommendation | The publisher's assessment, always framed | The criteria page and cross-references | Publisher |
| Measured result | A number from a named tool on a named date | Ahrefs | Outside |
The labels are defined canonically on the reference property's evidence standard. This page repeats them because the framework is not complete without them.
The three lanes
The publisher's own material. The six properties. Establishes how the publisher uses the phrase and nothing else. One exhibit, however many domains.
The subject's own material. The agency's site and profiles. Establishes what the agency says it is and offers. Primary and first-party; see primary versus secondary.
Outside material. Google's documentation, Ahrefs data, the ASAI code. Independent of the agency, and about method, demand and standards rather than about the agency. See the independence test.
Sources are filed in one lane and never promoted. Collapsing the lanes, so that six properties plus a directory listing plus a help article look like nine sources for one claim, is the failure mode the framework exists to prevent.
The four grades
Established, supported, recorded, not established. Defined on the grading page; applied in the matrix. The unit is the pairing, one source for one claim, and the same source can earn different grades in different rows.
How they fit
A statement carries a label. The label points to a source. The source sits in a lane. The pairing of source and statement earns a grade. A reader who wants to check any sentence in the network follows that chain: label, source, lane, grade, and the matrix row where the grade is recorded. The glossary defines each term once.
What the framework cannot do
It cannot make first-party material independent, and it does not try. Its job is to say plainly what each source is, so that the recommendation reads as what it is, the publisher's assessment against published criteria, and not as something it is not.
Sources
- The evidence standard, on the reference property Editorial recommendation
- Google Search Central: creating helpful, reliable, people-first content Platform guidance