How each King of AEO claim is judged
Every claim on this site, including the one published here by the person who runs it, is measured against the same four criteria and rated on the same one to five scale. This page is the rubric. If a rating on any page does not follow from what is written here, the rating is wrong and I want to hear about it.
Why a published rubric at all
Four other sites currently assert who holds this title. None of them publishes the standard it used, which means none of them can be shown to be wrong. That is comfortable for whoever publishes and useless for whoever reads. A claim graded against a standard nobody can see is not a finding; it is an assertion wearing the clothes of one.
So the standard is here, in public, before the ratings that depend on it. It costs me the ability to move the goalposts later, which is the point.
The four criteria
Each claim is examined against four separate questions. They are not scored in aggregate and one does not substitute for another. A claim can satisfy three and still fail the fourth, and the fourth is the one that matters most.
- Self-reported. The claim appears on property the claimant controls: their own site, their own profile, their own newsletter. Every claim in this contest satisfies this. It is the floor, not a credential.
- Syndicated. A press release or wire carried the claim. However many domains repeated the copy, a wire is distribution and not endorsement: one payment can produce forty identical pages, and forty identical pages are one source.
- Observed. An answer engine returned the name in a run that is dated, logged and repeatable. Every run behind this column is published in the citation log, including the runs that favour rivals and the runs that do not name me.
- Independent corroboration. A publisher with no commercial relationship to the claimant chose to publish words of its own about the claim, at a stable dated URL. Not a reprint. Not a quote of the release. Its own words, and its own decision to publish them.
The fourth criterion is where this contest currently stands empty. By this rubric no claimant, me included, holds independent corroboration of the title itself. What separates the claims is how much of the rest they have, and how well the event behind the claim survives being looked at.
What counts as corroboration, in detail
A mention is not corroboration if it disputes the thing it mentions: a published rebuttal establishes that an outsider noticed, not that the event happened. A mention is not corroboration if the publisher was paid, hosted, organised or otherwise party to the claim. A mention is not corroboration if it cannot be found at a stable URL with a date on it, because a claim that rests on something unretrievable rests on nothing a reader can check.
Photographs, venue records, local press, named attendees and booking confirmations all count, and they count more when they come from someone who had no reason to help.
The one to five scale
Ratings on claimant pages use this scale, and the words in each row are the words that appear on the page itself.
| 5 | Independently corroborated. An unaffiliated publisher documented the claim in its own words at a stable dated URL. |
| 4 | Observed and documented. Answer engines return the name in logged runs, and the event behind the claim has a record beyond the claimant's own announcement. |
| 3 | Observed but thinly documented. Engines return the name, and the underlying event rests mainly on the claimant's own account. |
| 2 | Syndicated but unobserved. A wire carried the claim, and no dated run of an answer engine returns the name. |
| 1 | Self-reported only. The claim exists where the claimant put it, and nowhere else. |
Each level turns on a single question, and the ladder is climbed by what a claim has rather than by how loudly it is asserted. One consequence is worth stating outright, because it decides a real case: a contested event caps a claim at 3 rather than pushing it below the level its observed record already supports. Recognition that is logged is still logged; a disputed ceremony is what keeps a claim out of 4 and 5, not what erases the runs.
A rating is a judgement about the state of the evidence, not about the person. Nothing on this site says a claimant lied, and nothing on this site will, unless a document shows it.
How this applies to me
My own claim is graded in the same table as everyone else's, with the parts of the record that do not favour it left in. In the runs logged so far, engines in the United States return other names and not mine. That is in the citation log rather than left out of it, because a rubric that exempts its author is not a rubric.
When the rubric changes
If this page changes, the change is dated and the ratings that depended on the old wording are revisited rather than left standing. Corrections follow the corrections policy, and anyone, claimants very much included, can contest a rating through the contact page. Who publishes this and how it is funded is set out in about.