Claims tracing is the discipline of refusing to publish any factual statement you can’t point to a source for. Every number dated, every quote verbatim, every “competitors don’t offer this” verified against their actual pages on an actual date.
The three failure modes it prevents
- Inherited fiction: a stat gets repeated across decks until nobody remembers it was invented. If you can’t re-find the source, the number dies.
- Quiet drift: “fastest in the region” was true two years ago. Dating every claim makes staleness visible instead of embarrassing.
- Legal exposure: unsubstantiated comparative claims are exactly what competitor complaints and FTC attention attach to. A source file is your defense.
How to run it
Keep one table per campaign: claim → source → date checked. Anything without a filled row gets rewritten as an opinion (“we believe…”), narrowed until it’s checkable, or cut. It feels pedantic for a week; then it becomes the reason your marketing never has to walk anything back.