Not invented for a product.
Source evaluation has a standard: the Admiralty Code, formalised as NATO AJP-2.1. It rates evidence on two independent axes — how reliable the source has been historically, and how well the specific information is backed up by other sources. Originally built for military and intelligence assessment, it’s still the working standard in open-source intelligence and structured fact-checking today.
ASURIQ’s three scoring categories extend that lineage rather than replace it. When a party disputes a verdict, the answer isn’t “trust us” — it’s this page: here is the standard, here are the categories, here is the record behind this specific score.
What the badge actually measures.
Every check answers three questions. Each question gets its own score. Only one of them drives the badge color.
Green is the most common state, because most correct answers should be green. When they aren’t, the thresholds are wrong, and we fix them — not the other way around. The badge rewards accuracy. It does not manufacture doubt.
What feeds the three categories.
Three categories answer your questions. Six evidence axes are how we get the answers. Each axis measures one specific property of the evidence behind a claim.
Five sources, one confirmation.
Agreement only counts when sources arrived at a claim separately. Five outlets citing the same press release are one confirmation repeated five times — not five confirmations.
Structure, always. Opinion, never.
“This claim’s four corroborating sources sit under two ownership groups” is a fact nobody can contest. “This source seems biased” is a judgment that can be argued with. ASURIQ reports the first kind and never the second — the vocabulary is the boundary, not a courtesy.
Third-party signals, kept separate.
When established fact-checkers like Snopes or PolitiFact have already reviewed a claim, ASURIQ surfaces their finding alongside the badge — but never bakes it into the score.
Fact-check results appear as a separate callout card in the detail view, visually distinct from ASURIQ’s own scoring. They are independent data, queried from the Google Fact Check API and Wikipedia in real time. A 60% word-overlap relevance gate ensures only genuinely related fact-checks are surfaced. ASURIQ never outsources its verdict — third-party findings are context, not authority.
What we reach. What we don’t.
Every free check queries 269 databases automatically. Detail cards add 3 commercial sources for a fuller ownership and sanctions picture.
Where no adequate source exists for a domain, ASURIQ says so rather than guessing. “We cannot verify this from public sources” is not the same as “this is unverifiable,” and neither is the same as “this is false.” Absence of evidence is reported as a coverage gap, never treated as evidence of absence.
Who verifies the verifier.
The same independence question we ask of every claim, asked of ourselves. Most of the databases above are not owned by any single commercial interest: SEC EDGAR, FDA, WHO, BLS, and Congress.gov are government bodies. PubMed, Wikipedia, Wikidata, CrossRef, arXiv, Europe PMC, and OpenAlex are run by public agencies, nonprofits, or academic institutions. That structure is published here, not asserted — the same ownership-transparency standard applied to ourselves first.
Patterns detected. Never conclusions.
ASURIQ reports evidence state with sources exposed. It never asserts that a claim is true or false beyond what the cited evidence shows, and it never characterises a source’s honesty or intent. What ships is agreement density, ownership structure, and origin-chain depth — measurable facts about public record, not a verdict on anyone’s character.
This is why the correction mechanism has no appeals process to argue with (see Corrections): there is no editorial judgment behind a score to contest. Submit public data supporting the alternative, the math re-runs, and the score moves if the evidence does.
This page is a version, not a live document.
Methodology changes are versioned, not silently edited. This page states which version was in effect for any certificate that cites it.
https://asuriq.dev/methodology