What counts as evidence in a Live Market?
A source link is a start. A trustworthy market value also needs a supporting excerpt, observation time and an honest label for inference.
Written by
Scraper.io
Editorial
A table can look authoritative long before it deserves to be trusted. Clean columns, company logos and precise-sounding values are presentation. Evidence is what lets a reader challenge the answer and reconstruct how it was reached.
For Scraper.io, a populated value is not complete because it has a URL. It is complete when the reader can identify the source, find the supporting material, see when it was observed and understand whether the value was stated directly or inferred.
A source is not yet evidence
Linking a company's homepage beside every row does not prove the fields in that row. The relevant statement may be on a pricing page, in documentation, in a release note or nowhere on the site at all.
Evidence needs a locator precise enough for another person to verify the claim. On a web page that means the exact URL and a short supporting excerpt. Other source types may require a document page, video timestamp or release identifier.
- The source URL or other exact locator
- A short excerpt that supports the value
- The time the source was observed
- The extraction or review state
- Whether the value is direct, inferred or disputed
Direct observation and inference are different products
“The pricing page lists a free plan” is a direct observation. “The vendor targets small teams” may be a reasonable interpretation of the same page, but it is still an inference. Both can be useful if the distinction stays visible.
Problems begin when inferred classifications are presented with the certainty of quoted facts. Labelling inference lets a customer decide where interpretation is acceptable and where a decision requires direct support.
If a field cannot be supported or responsibly inferred, it should remain empty. Coverage is not improved by hiding uncertainty.
Confidence needs an explanation
A decimal confidence score can look scientific without telling the reader anything useful. Confidence should follow evidence quality: source authority, recency, agreement between sources and the amount of interpretation required.
The explanation matters more than false precision. “Direct statement on the current pricing page” or “inferred from two agreeing official pages” gives a reviewer a basis for deciding how to use the value.
Conflicts belong in the record
A live market is assembled from sources written at different times by different parts of an organisation. Disagreement is inevitable. Deleting the inconvenient observation creates a neat current value at the cost of the history.
Instead, preserve each claim, connect the conflicting records and ask for review when the conflict matters. A later source can supersede an earlier fact without rewriting what was observed before.
Corrections should create history
When a customer corrects a value, the correction should not overwrite the original claim without trace. Store the correction as a new decision with its own evidence and mark what it supersedes.
That history does two jobs. It explains the current answer, and it teaches the customer-specific evaluator what counts as useful, wrong, duplicated or irrelevant next time.
Evidence changes how people and agents use the market
A human can open the supporting source before putting a fact in a client brief. An agent can carry the citation into its output, refuse unsupported actions or route an uncertain value for review.
The same principle applies to both: the consumer should not need to repeat the entire crawl just to decide whether the supplied context is trustworthy.
Evidence is not a decorative column added after collection. It is the contract behind every populated value. Without it, a live market is merely a changing spreadsheet; with it, the market becomes inspectable state that a person or system can use responsibly.