Claim Verifier

claim-verifier — the cite-or-cut gate

The runnable enforcement of the Nexus doctrine's spine: an unprovable claim cannot physically reach publication. It takes a finished draft plus its substantiation set and returns one of two things — a frozen, ship-ready Substantiation Ledger, or a cut-list + BLOCK. It executes doctrine gates 3 (cite-or-cut), 4 (excluded-tactics) and 6 (freeze ledger) as a repeatable audit. The ledger schema and the full Excluded-Tactics list are defined in ../nexus-copywriter/references/DOCTRINE.md; this skill is the procedure that runs them.

Why this is not an existing skill

• storm sources facts forward (research → a new cited article) and is explicitly not for marketing copy. This audits finished copy backward — each existing claim → its record. storm is doctrine stage 0; this is stages 3/4/6.
• eeat scores trust signals holistically ("does this look credible") and advises, does not gate. It never walks each claim to a record, never cuts the unprovable, and enforces no claim law. This is a hard, per-claim gate with Australian Consumer Law inside it.
• specialist-council / boardroom deliberate and triangulate decisions; neither checks a claim against evidence.
• marketing-copywriter writes the words; this verifies them.

When to use

• The final step before any Nexus copy asset ships, once craft + eeat are done.
• Any time a claim's basis may have lapsed (review count, SLA, certificate, price history) and the frozen ledger must be re-verified.

When NOT to use

• Before facts exist — source them first via storm (doctrine stage 0). This gate assumes a substantiation set is already on file.
• Pure trust/authorship polish → eeat. Pure wording → marketing-copywriter.

Inputs

• draft — the finished copy. Ideally claim-tagged from doctrine stage 2; if untagged, this gate tags it in step 1.
• substantiation set — the records on file: invoice/dispatch-log exports, review exports, certificates, test results, dated price history, licence numbers, credential docs (storm output + client records). A record is a URL or document ID, never a memory.

Method

1. Extract & tag every checkable claim

Read the draft sentence by sentence. Give every sentence that asserts a checkable fact a Claim-ID. Mark obvious subjective opinion as puffery (untagged, legal, but never counted as proof). Flag forward-looking claims ("we'll save you X", "on-site within 60 min") — they need reasonable grounds held at publish time, not just a past record.

• Completion: no factual sentence is untagged; every non-puffery sentence has a Claim-ID.

2. Cite-or-cut — resolve each Claim-ID to a record

Walk every Claim-ID against the substantiation set. Each resolves to exactly one outcome:

• has a concrete record → keep, cite inline, carry the record into the ledger;
• no record, or only round-number/"trust-me"/legend → cut (delete) or demote to puffery if a subjective rephrase is honest. No "verify later", no "probably". Superlatives ("best / #1 / fastest / most trusted") need dated, provable evidence or they are cut on sight.
• Completion: every Claim-ID is either recorded or on the cut-list. Zero unresolved.

3. Excluded-tactics / ACL deny-list pass

A claim can be truthfully sourced yet deployed illegally. Run the draft against the Excluded Tactics + quick-deny list in ../nexus-copywriter/references/DOCTRINE.md — invented urgency / resetting timers / phantom scarcity; "was/now" without a genuine prior sale period; fake, connected-undisclosed, or incentivised-undisclosed reviews; unqualified green/"Australian Made" claims; non-Code-compliant franchise earnings implications; material silence that changes the overall impression (s18 needs no intent). Any hit is a hard stop — the tactic is removed, not softened.

• Completion: no deny-list hit survives in the draft.

4. Set expiry / review dates

Substantiation decays. Assign each shipping claim a review/expiry date — reviews +90d, SLAs and response-time promises per current ops, certificates per their expiry, price history per the next price change.

• Completion: every shipping claim carries an expiry.

5. Freeze the ledger & emit the verdict

Produce the Substantiation Ledger (Claim-ID | claim text | record/basis-at-time | expiry) and a verdict:

• SHIP-READY — every claim recorded, deny-list clean, ledger frozen and attached to travel with the asset for its life.
• BLOCK — a cut-list of every claim removed/demoted and every deny-list hit, with what record or rewrite would clear it. The asset does not ship until re-run clean. Apply the skeptic test: a skeptical regulator, journalist, and customer each fact-check the piece line by line. If any claim can't survive all three, it is not SHIP-READY.
• Completion: ledger frozen or cut-list returned; a verdict is emitted.

Hard rules

• A claim with no ledger row does not appear in the copy. Full stop.
• The gate cannot be waived by deadline, client pressure, or a good-sounding line.
• A record is a source URL or document ID — never a memory, never a round number.
• This gate verifies; it never writes new claims or invents records. Missing facts go back to storm, not into the ledger.