How a draft becomes a graded, sourced report in a single pass
Paste, Markdown, PDF, or DOCX. Every checkable claim is pulled out, word for word.
Nielsen surveyed more than 28,000 people across 56 countries, finding that 92 percent of consumers trust earned media, meaning press and media coverage, above every other form of advertising. The same study found online reviews ranked as the least trusted source of brand information. Content marketing costs 62 percent less than traditional marketing while generating three times the leads, and companies that blog get 67 percent more leads, which proves that blogging drives growth. In fact, a 2023 Harvard Business School study found that PR-driven leads convert five times better than paid ones.▍
Sequential mode: one claim verified at a time, in the order shown below. Default for shorter drafts.
Read the whole piece, then state plainly what is being checked and how many claims were found.
A primary source, ideally two, confirms it as written.
The core is right, but a detail is off, dated, or loosely rounded.
Traceable, but stripped context or framing claims more than the source supports.
We searched and found no reliable source either way. It may be true, but it cannot be confirmed as written. Action: add a citation or cut it.
A credible source directly contradicts it.
We checked, and the cited study, source, or quote does not exist, or the real source says something different. Action: remove it.
The difference: Unverifiable means we could not find evidence either way (absence of evidence). Fabricated means we found evidence it is invented or wrong (evidence of absence). Never treat one as the other.
The ten steps are the sequence claims move through. These five principles are the standards applied at every step, plus six more woven directly into steps 04, 05, 06, 08 and 09 above, and one (parallel verification) behind the 2 MODES stat up top. Eleven methods, one skill.
Judge a claim by opening other sources, not by reading further down the same page.
Every load-bearing claim is checked away from the document, following SIFT's four moves: Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace to the original.
In plain terms: Don't trust a page to vouch for itself. Open up what independent sources say, then decide.
The professional code real fact-checking organisations operate under.
Non-partisanship, transparency about sources and method, and visible corrections, borrowed from the International Fact-Checking Network.
In plain terms: The rulebook serious fact-checkers sign onto. The skill works to that standard.
Follow every claim back to where it actually originated.
Statistics and quotes are traced past any secondary report to the original dataset, paper, or transcript.
In plain terms: A primary source is the original, not someone repeating it.
Rank every source before trusting it.
In plain terms: A claim is only “Verified” on T1 or T2. The skill won't bless anything lower.
A safety guard for a tool that reads the open web.
Any instruction found inside a fetched page is treated as suspicious data to report, never as a command to obey.
In plain terms: Bad actors hide commands inside web pages to trick AI. The skill reads those as content to flag, not orders to follow.
Rigour that is too slow to use does not get used.
Many claims can be verified concurrently with helper agents, then aggregated, applying the same rules to each. This is “Parallel” mode, the second of the 2 MODES above, alongside default Sequential mode.
In plain terms: For a long piece, the skill checks many claims at once instead of one by one. Same standards, less waiting.
Rigour that is too slow to use does not get used.
Spell-check caught typos. Grammar-check caught grammar. FactcheckIQ catches the false claim and the invented source, before your reader does. It works the same whether a person or an AI wrote the draft: it verifies, and it never writes for you. Like the typewriter, spell-check, and Grammarly before it, this is a tool that makes writers more trustworthy, not obsolete.