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Verification

ATDb shows a small chip near the top of company, person, event, and news pages that tells you, at a glance, how confident you should be in the facts on that page. We call it the verification seal.

This page explains what the seal means, how we score facts, and what you can do when something looks wrong.

The seal — what each state means

Click the chip to open a panel with the sources behind it (with archive links where we have them). The chip is color-coded by how strongly the headline facts are backed.

🟢 "Verified · N sources" (green)

The headline facts (parent company, founding year, M&A status, etc.) are backed by N distinct origin sources, including at least one independent source — trade press, a regulator filing, an encyclopedia, etc. "Distinct origin" means independent publishers: wire-syndicated reprints of the same press release count as one origin, not N. This is the strongest state; the higher N gets, the harder it is for a single bad source to drag a fact off-true.

🟡 "Corroborated · N sources" (amber)

The entity has N distinct origins, but all of them are company directories, profiles, or first-party pages (Crunchbase, G2, the company's own site or docs) — there's no independent reporting backing it yet. We're confident the entity exists and is roughly what it claims, but the facts aren't independently verified. Open the panel to help confirm with an independent source.

⚪ "N sources · Updated {date}" (gray)

The facts are backed by multiple origins, but the most recent source we recorded is more than 30 days old, so the facts may have moved since. The chip states the age plainly and stays gray; it turns amber only when the last check is about six months old or more, which means a re-check is due.

⚪ "Unverified" (gray)

We don't yet have at least two distinct origins backing the headline facts. The data may still be correct — most of it was originally enriched by AI before our verification system was built — but we haven't lined up structured sources yet. On a company profile header, an unsourced entity simply shows no chip; other surfaces show "Unverified."

When you open the panel on an Unverified or Corroborated entity, a Help confirm this fact link takes you to the entity's /verify/[slug] page, where you can suggest an edit or submit a source.

How we decide what's "verified"

For each entity, we score the headline facts against three lenses:

  1. Source class — different kinds of sources earn different weight. A regulator filing (e.g., SEC.gov, FTC.gov) carries more weight than a trade-press article; a trade-press article carries more weight than a press wire (PRNewswire, BusinessWire); a press wire carries more weight than a tertiary reference (Wikipedia, which itself cites other sources). The full classes are editorial, press_wire, primary_regulator, primary_corporate, tertiary_reference, and directory_aggregator (company directories / profiles / app-store listings — corroborating, but not independent reporting, so they earn the amber "Corroborated" state rather than green).
  2. Stance — when we find a source about a fact, an automated classifier reads the source's framing. A source that says "X acquired Y" is a "support" stance. A source that says "X is reportedly exploring acquiring Y" is "rumored." Only sources that align with the canonical claim count toward verification.
  3. Independence — we filter out syndication. If five publications all reprint the same press release verbatim, that's one origin, not five. We score distinct origin domains, not raw article counts.

The seal updates automatically as enrichment runs find new sources or as you (the community) submit corrections.

On company profiles, individual facts in the header (such as Founded, HQ, and Parent) carry their own small marker: a filled green circle with a check for verified, an amber ring with a tilde for corroborated, and a gray ring with a question mark for unverified. Click it to see that fact's sources.

Pinned facts

Some facts on ATDb are pinned by an editor. These show up the same as any other verified fact, but they're protected from being overwritten by future AI enrichment runs. Pinning happens when we manually research and confirm something — for example, when a community-submitted correction is approved.

Pinned facts always win against AI guesses, but they don't bypass the source-count threshold. A pinned fact still needs two independent origins before earning the "Verified · N sources" chip.

Hallucination scoring

When an enrichment AI proposes a new fact (or rewrites an existing one), an automated scorer runs to check whether the proposed claim is supported by the source the AI cited. This catches the most common AI failure mode — the AI confidently asserting something the source doesn't actually say.

Hallucination scoring happens behind the scenes. It helps decide what we trust and what gets a second look, and it isn't shown on pages today.

The "Help confirm" link

On Unverified and Corroborated entities, the seal panel includes a Help confirm this fact link. It opens /verify/[entity-slug], which explains what's needed (two reliable, independent sources).

From the verify page, you can:

  • Suggest an edit — propose a corrected value via the existing edit flow
  • Send us a source — email a link that supports (or disputes) the current value. Beta members may also see an Add a source link option on the page.

Both routes go through normal community-correction admin review.

What gets verified

The seal scores headline facts — the kind of thing you'd see in the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article:

  • For companies: parent company, founding year, operational status, headquarters location, primary category
  • For people: current role, current company, notable past roles
  • For events: event type (acquisition / merger / IPO / etc.), the parties involved, the announcement date
  • For news: the source publication and publication date

Body-text claims (the overview prose) are NOT individually scored against the seal yet — they may still contain stale info even on an otherwise "Verified" entity. The seal is a header-row signal, not a guarantee that every word of the page is true.

Reporting something wrong

If you see something that looks wrong on any page:

  1. Click "Report a key fact" or "Report a field" — the pills in the At a glance panel and the Overview tab drop a structured correction into the admin review queue
  2. Open the verification chip — its panel links to the /verify page, where you can suggest an edit or send a source
  3. Click "Spotted an error?" at the bottom of the page — opens a free-text feedback form

All three routes go through admin review. Submissions don't auto-apply to data.

Why we built this

ATDb's headline promise is "the AdTech database you can actually trust". AI enrichment is fast but error-prone; manual editorial review is accurate but slow. The verification seal is the bridge: every fact tells you, on the entity page itself, how solid the underlying evidence is — so you can spot the soft data before quoting it.

The system is new and improving fast. We'd rather show "Unverified" honestly than fake confidence we haven't earned.

See also: Glossary — definitions for source class, origin, fact_sources, Help confirm, and other verification terms.