Readers should be able to inspect the evidence.
WTFIsTrending.com links evidence at article level and explains where confidence is strong, limited or still developing. A citation is not decoration: it should support a specific claim and allow a reader to examine the original context.
Last reviewed: 24 July 2026
Our source hierarchy
Primary and official evidence
Technical documentation, standards, laws, regulator guidance, research papers, official repositories, system cards and directly attributable statements.
Independent specialist evidence
Peer-reviewed research, established security organizations, benchmark maintainers and technically qualified reporting that adds verification or context.
Secondary reporting
Used to explain events or competing interpretations when the original material is unavailable, incomplete or requires independent confirmation.
Community and anecdotal signals
Useful for identifying an emerging issue, never sufficient by themselves for a broad factual conclusion.
How sources are checked
- Open and inspect the source rather than citing a search snippet or another article’s summary.
- Prefer the original document when several pages repeat the same announcement or statistic.
- Check the publication date, version, jurisdiction, model, benchmark conditions and later corrections.
- Distinguish a measured result from a vendor claim, forecast, demonstration or editorial interpretation.
- Use more than one independent source when a claim is disputed, consequential or difficult to reproduce.
- Link readers to the page that supports the claim, not merely to a publisher’s home page.
- Avoid citation padding: every listed source must materially contribute to the article.
- Recheck time-sensitive claims when an article is updated.
Benchmarks and numerical claims
Benchmark results are reported with the task, model version, evaluation conditions and important limitations where those details affect interpretation. A leaderboard position is not treated as proof that a system will perform the same way in a reader’s workflow.
Conflicts, uncertainty and missing evidence
Reliable sources can disagree because they tested different versions, populations or conditions. We describe the disagreement rather than selecting the most dramatic number. When the evidence does not support a firm conclusion, the article should say so.
External links
Links are provided for verification and further reading. A link does not imply endorsement of every claim, product or policy on the external site. External pages can change after publication; material changes may require an article update or correction.
Search transparency
These rules support Google’s people-first guidance by making the “who, how and why” of our work visible: named authorship, clear research methods, direct evidence and an editorial purpose focused on helping readers rather than manufacturing pages for search traffic.