Everyone in this trade says "sourced". Almost nobody shows you what that means when a source doesn't hold. Below is a sanitised extract from a real route package, the method that produced it, and the thresholds the grading actually uses — including the ones we fail.
Planning safe movement for a business trip to Baghdad. The destination could not be confirmed — which gate admits visitors was unknown — so the package says so on its cover rather than burying it. Every competitor shows you green checkmarks.
Read the failure carefully, because it is the useful part. A generic map pin for the destination sits deep inside a perimeter, and a plan built on it would put a car at the wrong wall of a compound at the wrong hour. The honest output is not a better guess. It is naming the one thing that has to be confirmed by the host before anybody travels.
Most enquiries arrive as a topic, not a question. Before anything is collected, the decision gets written down in a form that can be answered and can be wrong — because a question that cannot fail cannot be researched either.
A cited source is retrieved and stored, so the citation points at a document we hold rather than at a model's recollection of one. A portal that led us to a record is logged as a route to it, never counted as a source in its own right.
Who said a thing is separated from where it appeared, and from the outlet family that carried it. Only independent, named originators count toward corroboration. Four papers running one wire story is one source, and the system records it as one.
The conclusion is attacked on its own evidence — what would have to be true for it to be wrong, and whether anything in hand already says so. Judgements that do not survive are weakened or dropped rather than quietly rewritten.
The alternatives considered, the reason each was set aside, and the red-team verdict stay in the deliverable. A judgement you cannot argue with is not a judgement you can rely on.
This is where most "multi-source verified" claims quietly fall apart. If you count articles, a single agency report syndicated across a morning looks like overwhelming agreement. We hold the originator — who actually said it — apart from the publication that carried it and from the outlet family behind that, and only independent named originators count toward corroboration. It is a structural rule in the code, not an editorial intention.
Worth saying plainly: where only one originator has been established for a finding, it is labelled single-source — including when we suspect the story is better supported than our record of it shows. The system is built to under-claim corroboration rather than assert agreement it cannot demonstrate, so a finding is sometimes graded weaker than it deserves. That is the direction we would rather fail in, and the label is what tells you it happened.
A firm that grades its evidence and won't tell you where the boundaries sit hasn't really told you anything. These are the actual values the grading uses.
Separately, a headline measurement is not allowed out at all unless source coverage passes its own rubric — enough of the period actually covered, enough locations resolved precisely, no single provider dominating the picture, and at least two named originators present. Fail that and the finding is reported as limited or unmeasured rather than stated as measured.
Aegilo maintains its own body of events and claims rather than querying someone else's index at the moment of asking. Every release is stamped, checksummed and kept, so a judgement made in July can be re-examined against exactly the material that produced it — rather than against whatever the web says a year later. Figures below are from the release promoted on 27 July 2026.
This supplies the surrounding picture — what has happened around a place, an actor or a route, and who reported it. It is not a substitute for the registers, maps and local records a specific question needs, and for a named location those are read per engagement rather than assumed to be pre-loaded.
A page about provenance that overstated would refute itself. So, explicitly: we publish no accuracy score and no track record, because no completed benchmark exists to support one. We do not issue probabilities or predictive risk scores — confidence is stated in words, with the reason. We do not do parcel-level or cadastral geometry, sanctions and PEP screening, live or always-on monitoring, or investigation of individuals beyond what they have consented to. Where a question needs any of those, we say so and make introductions.
And the honest one about this page: everything above describes how the work is produced. It is not a client report. For a sample of the deliverable itself, ask — we send one with the reply.
By independent named originator, not by article. Who said something is held separately from where it appeared and from the outlet family that carried it, and only independent named originators count toward corroboration. Four newspapers reprinting one wire story is one source. Unnamed placeholders and tertiary aggregators can evidence a claim but can never establish corroboration on their own.
Three or more independent originators across at least two different types of source is graded strong. Two or more independent originators is partial. Anything below that is graded weak and labelled weak. Where sources disagree, the finding is conflicted and the disagreement is reported rather than resolved by preference.
No. Confidence is stated in words with the reason attached, never as a manufactured percentage. Nobody reduces a contested future to a number honestly, and a figure invites a precision the evidence does not carry. Where a measurement exists it is reported as a measurement, and it is not the same thing as a forecast.
Because the cited document is fetched and held, so a claim can be checked against the source it came from rather than a paraphrase. Every model call is recorded with the model, the prompt, the response and its hash, and a build test fails if any code path skips that record. The attribution guards can only ever remove or weaken an originator — they are not able to invent one or manufacture agreement between sources.
The method above is also published weekly, in public, in The Brief — the same source handling, on a live watchlist.