Expertise
Corroboration and third-party sources
If your website disappeared tonight, what could the market still learn about you tomorrow?
What it means
Corroboration is the body of material about a company that the company did not write: press, directories, industry bodies, forums, review sites, conference listings, other people's articles. Search has always weighted it. AI systems weight it more heavily, because a claim repeated by independent sources is the closest thing a language model has to a fact.
Why it matters
Almost every lever a company pulls is on property it owns: the site, the structured data, the blog. Internet Reality also contains third-party sources, reviews and silence, and none of those can be edited. A company with excellent pages and no external corroboration reads to a machine as a company making claims about itself. The failure is quiet. Nothing is wrong, there is simply nothing there.
What you control
- In your hands
- What you publish that is worth citing, who you make available to be quoted, which records you claim, and how consistent the facts you offer are.
- Not in your hands
- Whether anybody cites it. Corroboration can be earned. It cannot be written.
What we do
- Establish what independent sources currently say, and where they contradict each other or the company.
- Find the silence: the directories, industry bodies and category lists where a company of this kind is expected and absent.
- Correct the records that are both wrong and claimable, which is usually the fastest gain available.
- Decide what is genuinely worth citing, and make it easy for somebody else to cite it accurately.
How we use the framework
Internet Reality is assembled from sources a company mostly does not control. This is the part of the framework that cannot be repaired by editing a page, which is why it is the part most often left alone.
See the full frameworkCommon questions
Is this digital PR?
Digital PR is one way to earn corroboration and not the only one. Claiming records, correcting wrong ones and appearing where your category is listed cost nothing, and they are almost always the work left undone.
Do reviews matter?
Enormously for some businesses and barely at all for others. For a consultancy selling six-figure engagements, one substantive independent article and an industry body listing outweigh a hundred reviews.
How do we know whether we have a silence problem?
Search your company name and read past your own properties. If the first independent source is a company registry, the market has nothing to go on except your own word.
Start with what the market can see.
A conversation is enough to know whether there is a gap worth closing.