How we check a link

Paste an article. We open each link and read the page. Then we tell you what it says.

The three answers

Every number gets one of three answers.

• The page says this. We found your number on the page you linked. We show you the sentence.
• The page does not say this. We read the page and your number is not on it. We show you the closest thing that is.
• We could not check. We could not read the page. We say why.

We never say a number is false. That is a different question and we do not answer it.

A real example

A big SEO site wrote this. It is still up today.

61.5% of desktop searches and 34.4% of mobile searches end without a click.

The page they link to says the opposite. 61.5% is mobile. 34.3% is desktop.

Same numbers, two words swapped. Nobody caught it for years.

The writer was not careless. They read a real study and typed it up. One slip, and the link no longer backs the sentence.

Why we could not check is a finding

Often we open a link and cannot read it. That is not a failure. Your reader hits the same wall.

• Behind a paywall. Your reader needs an account to see it too.
• Dead link. It is gone. Your reader lands on nothing.
• Live dashboard. The page only shows today. The number moves after you write.
• No link at all. There is nothing for a reader to open.

Each of these is worth knowing before you publish. The fix is short: link the page the number came from.

Sources drift, and it is nobody’s fault

A page can change after you link it. Reports get moved. Studies get replaced by a product page.

Your sentence was right the day you wrote it. Today the link does not show it.

This is the most common problem we find. It is maintenance, not a mistake.

What we found in real articles

We checked 114 numbers across 11 stats-heavy articles. Here is what we found.

48% of the numbers had no source at all.

Of the 59 that did carry a link:

• 34 pages we could read
• 20 were behind a paywall
• 3 links were dead
• 2 pointed at a live dashboard

Of all 114 numbers, 80 lead nowhere a reader can follow. That is 55 with no source, plus 25 whose link cannot be read.

We publish this because nobody else has measured it. The numbers are ours and you can check them yourself.

What we do not do

We do not save the text you paste. We keep nothing.

We do not score your article. There is no grade and no percentage.

We do not tell you a number is wrong. We show you what the page says, and you decide.