I never publish an AI draft the way it arrives. I run an editing checklist first, and I have written about that. But there is a separate pass after it, and it deserves its own name. I call it getting the draft checked. This post explains what it is, the order I run it in, and what happens to a claim I cannot prove.
What “checked” means on my site
A draft is checked when every claim in it has a verdict. Not most claims. Every one. A claim is any sentence that could be wrong: a number, a date, a quote, a statement about how something works. The verdict is one of two words: confirmed, or unconfirmed.
Most blogs stop at “this sounds right”. That is where the trouble starts. Likely text reads smoothly. An AI draft in particular produces confident sentences, and confidence is not evidence.
The order I use
I do not check claims in the order they appear. I check them in order of damage. First the numbers, then the quotes, then everything else. A wrong number in a headline claim costs more than a fuzzy sentence halfway down. So that is what I would do first.
For each claim, I look for the original. The company’s own page, the study itself, the official document. I do not accept another blog as proof, because blogs repeat each other and a wrong number travels across many sites before anyone notices.
What I do with a claim that is only likely
Sometimes I find the same claim in five places, but never at the source. It reads as likely text. It is probably true. It is not confirmed. I park it as unconfirmed, and then I decide.
If the post works without it, I cut the claim. If the post needs it, I rewrite the sentence so it says what I can actually stand behind. What I never do is leave it in as fact.
The cost of skipping the pass
The costs are not abstract. A reader who catches one wrong number rejects the whole post, and everything else I have written with it. That is the real price. A draft that took an hour to write can lose trust in a sentence.
There is a smaller cost too. Checking takes less time than rewriting. Ten minutes in order beats two hours fixing things after publication.
How this fits the rest of my process
The checked pass runs after the editing checklist and before internal links. Only confirmed claims survive it. Then I link two or three older posts, using words that describe them, so a search engine knows what they are about.
If you want the full fact-checking routine, I wrote a separate post on how I fact-check an AI draft. The checklist that runs before it has its own post too. This one is about the stage in between: the pass where the draft stops being mine and starts being checkable.