Fact-Checking
Fact-checking is verifying a claim against evidence before, or after, it is published. On the web it has two forms: the editorial practice of confirming what a page says, and the machine-readable record of a claim having been checked, written with the schema.org ClaimReview type.
Two meanings, one habit
Editorially, fact-checking means that every figure, date, name and quotation on a page can be traced to a source, and that someone traced it. On a business site the claims are smaller than in journalism but the habit is the same: the opening hours are the real ones, the price range is current, the “since 1998” is true, the accreditation named is held. An assistant that fetches the page has no way to tell a checked claim from an unchecked one; it can only notice when two of the site’s own pages disagree.
The markup form is ClaimReview, used by fact-checking organizations to record a specific claim, who made it, and the verdict. Google’s fact check documentation lists three required properties, claimReviewed, reviewRating and url, restricts it to one claim per page, requires the site to hold to standards on corrections and sourcing, and now says the markup is being phased out in Google Search. It is a publisher’s tool for reporting on other people’s claims, and a business marking up its own statements with it would be misusing the type.
A common question
Do AI assistants fact-check what they say about a business?
Not in the editorial sense. An assistant answering with retrieval fetches pages and composes an answer from them, and its citations show which pages it read; an assistant answering from training alone checks nothing at the moment of writing. Neither rings the business to confirm. So the checking that happens is against what the site serves: if the pages state one phone number and one set of hours, the assistant can be right; if they state two, it can quote either. The business does the fact-checking in advance by keeping its own pages consistent.
Related terms
Sources
Markup: schema.org, ClaimReview and Google Search Central, fact check structured data. The question and answer above state mechanism only; no figures on this page.