Every claim clicks through to its proof
Why every claim carries a capture
Strategy work runs on assertion. A deck says your competitor is "moving upmarket" or your brand "lacks clarity." Ask what that rests on and you get a confident face. The work may be right. You cannot check.
We built Rathvane so you can. Every claim in a deliverable links to a dated capture in an Evidence Locker. Click the sentence and you land on the pixels: the page as it looked, the answer as it was given, the date it was taken.
This is not a feature we added. It is the reason the firm works the way it does. Checking claims against primary sources before they ship is slow if people do it by hand, which is why nobody does. AI is our infrastructure. It makes the checking fast enough to do on every claim, every time. The judgment about what the evidence means is ours, and it is labelled as ours.
What a capture contains
Five things, every time.
The answer. The page, the listing, the filing, or the answer-engine response, as a buyer would have seen it. Pixels, not a paraphrase.
The prompt. The exact question or query that produced it. For an answer engine, the words typed. For a page, the address and the path that reached it.
The date. When the capture was taken, to the minute. Answers vary by day. A claim without a date is a claim you cannot test.
The source it leaned on. Where the information came from, and, for a machine's answer, which page most likely taught it.
A content hash. A fingerprint of the capture at the moment it was taken. Recompute it and you can confirm nothing has been edited since. You do not have to take our word that the evidence is untouched.
Captures are rated by source quality. A company's own filing outranks a third-party listing. A third-party listing outranks a forum. The rating travels with the claim, so you know how much weight it can bear.
What the locker lets a skeptical reader do
Audit any sentence. Read the deliverable. Pick the claim you least believe. Click it. Judge for yourself.
Separate observation from opinion. Every statement is one of two kinds: an observation with a capture behind it, or a reading marked as ours. The second kind is where our judgment lives, and you can discount it as you see fit. You will always be able to tell which is which.
Hand it to someone who wasn't in the room. A board member, an investor's analyst, a diligence team. They can verify the trail without calling us and without taking your word for it either.
Attach it to a request. When a wrong answer traces to a page you don't control, the capture is the thing you send with the correction request. It shows what was said, when, and by what.
Compare it a quarter later. Take the same questions to the same surfaces ninety days on and set the captures side by side. Nobody can produce that comparison after the fact. It requires having taken the first photograph.
What we will not claim
An evidence trail is only honest if it also shows its limits. These are ours.
- We cannot see inside any model, cannot audit what it was trained on, and cannot promise that a change you make will produce a particular answer.
- Answers vary by session, account, region and day. We capture what a buyer would plausibly have seen, on a date, with the prompt recorded. We do not claim it can be reproduced.
- Influence over the machine layer is indirect and slow. It works through what you publish, the facts you state in a form a machine can read, and what third parties say. It takes months, not days.
- Anyone promising to rank you in an answer engine, on a timetable, is selling something nobody can deliver. We are not that firm, and this page is the proof.
- There are things about your industry we will not know after a few weeks that you have known for twenty years. We will not write around them confidently. Where we don't know, the deliverable says so.
- We do not produce a single score where the underlying answers vary. A number would be false precision. We show the grid, cell by cell, each backed by a capture.
One screen before everything else
Someone who read an early deliverable put it in seven words: don't give me the labor, give me the baby.
So the first thing you see is one screen. What is wrong. What it costs you. The one move. The three fixes behind it. Where the proof sits. Nothing else, until you want it.
Behind that screen is the full deliverable. Behind the deliverable is the locker. Beside all of it is Ask Rathvane, a consultant trained on your engagement, which answers from the 60 to 70 percent of the research that never made it onto a page. Ask it where to start and it will tell you. Ask it to show its work and it will link you to the capture.
Depth is there for the reader who wants it. It is never the price of admission.
The locker compounds
A capture is a photograph with a date on it. One is proof. Two, a quarter apart, is a direction. A locker that has been re-captured through a year is a record of how your market moved, and that record is the thing nobody can produce retrospectively.
Change tracking. Every re-capture is laid beside the last one. A competitor's price that moved. A page that disappeared. A review surface that got worse. An answer engine that now names someone else when your buyers ask. You see what changed, when, and what it means for the next decision, not a fresh report that pretends the last one never existed.
War-gaming. The scenario products build their moves from the captures, not from a whiteboard. When we model what a competitor does if you cut price, the model starts from what that competitor actually did the last three times something moved, with the evidence attached.
Forecasts, labelled. Where we look forward, the deliverable says it is looking forward. Evidence and reasoning are never blended, so a board can see exactly where the record ends and the judgment begins.
Across your products. Hold more than one, and the lockers read together. The pricing intelligence informs the competitive picture. The perception intelligence informs the positioning. Ask Rathvane answers across all of it.
See it on your own company
The fastest way to understand the locker is to receive one. The free snapshot is one page about what the answer engines say about you, every answer captured with its prompt and date. It is complete in itself, and nothing is withheld to sell you the next thing.