Seekde AI Search and Discovery Intelligence
Seekde
⌕ Try Seekde →
Seekde

Source & Citation Policy

Seekde is committed to transparent, verifiable, and authoritative research across AI search, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and discovery intelligence.

Our readers rely on our technical analyses, platform guides, and empirical benchmarks to make informed architectural, content, and marketing decisions. To ensure absolute data integrity, all published claims, statistics, and references must comply with this Source & Citation Policy.

1. The Seekde Four-Tier Evidence Ladder

All factual statements, algorithmic assertions, and technical claims in Seekde publications must be anchored to verifiable evidence according to our formal four-tier hierarchy:

Tier 1 — Primary Platform & Protocol Documentation (Highest Authority)

  • Official developer documentation, release notes, technical blogs, and API references published by major platform operators: Google Search Central, OpenAI Developer Documentation, Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools, Anthropic Docs, and Perplexity Developer Platform.
  • Internet engineering standards and protocol specifications: W3C Recommendations, IETF RFCs, Schema.org specifications, and robots.txt standards.

Tier 2 — Academic Computer Science & Information Retrieval Research

  • Peer-reviewed conference proceedings and journals: ACM SIGIR, KDD, WWW (The Web Conference), EMNLP, ACL, and NeurIPS.
  • Pre-print technical papers from recognized research institutions and university AI laboratories (e.g., Stanford CRFM, Princeton NLP, MIT CSAIL) published on arXiv, subject to internal methodological review.

Tier 3 — Independent Technical Journalism & Verifiable Industry Reporting

  • Established search and digital marketing publications with rigorous editorial oversight: Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, Digiday, and Reuters Technology.
  • Primary survey data, SEC filings, and quarterly earnings reports from publicly traded search and technology companies.

Tier 4 — Documented Practitioner Observations & Case Studies

  • Transparent, reproducible practitioner observations where test parameters, sample sizes, execution dates, and interface captures are fully disclosed.
  • Proprietary empirical studies conducted in accordance with the Seekde Research Methodology.

2. Unacceptable Sources

Seekde strictly prohibits the use of the following as factual evidence:

  • Anonymous social media posts or unverified forum commentary.
  • Secondary blog posts that merely summarize Tier 1 documentation without original analysis or attribution.
  • Marketing copy, vendor sales brochures, or press releases that present unverified performance claims.
  • Synthetic content generated by LLMs without human verification against primary sources.

3. Editorial Independence & Commercial Disclosures

  • Editorial Citations Cannot Be Purchased: Editorial citations, benchmark inclusions, and analytical conclusions can never be purchased, influenced, or commercially placed. Payment does not constitute evidence under any tier of our evidence ladder.
  • Separation of Commercial and Editorial Operations: Seekde permits advertising, sponsored research partnerships, and commercial collaborations, but all commercial initiatives are governed separately by our Sponsored Content Policy and Commercial Disclosure.
  • Mandatory Commercial Disclosures: Any sponsored content, commercial partnership, or affiliate relationship is prominently, explicitly, and unambiguously disclosed to readers in accordance with FTC guidelines. Commercial arrangements never confer preferential treatment in independent editorial evaluations or citation indexes.
  • Direct Contextual Attribution: External links in editorial articles are selected strictly by researchers and writers for reader utility, authoritative documentation, and primary research verification.

4. Relationship to Research Methodology

This policy functions in direct tandem with the Seekde Research Methodology, which establishes our formal operational separation across nine statement categories (from DOCUMENTED_FACT to HYPOTHESIS) and defines our volatility control standards for generative search experiments.

For questions regarding our sourcing practices or to submit primary documentation for editorial review, contact our research desk at contact@seekde.io or visit our Contact Page.

Action completed.