Every claim gets a primary source: building reference sites AI assistants can trust

Two of our newest reference sites cover very different subjects and run on the same rule: every fact on the page rests on a source you can click.

The War On News is a dated record of how governments have limited journalists, from 1900 to today. It’s organized by country, by tactic and by era. Each entry gives the date, who was in charge, the reason the government gave, and how it ended. It’s a record, not a news outlet, and it doesn’t rate countries or outlets.

Dark Skies Directory is a directory and calendar for people in the US and Canada who plan trips around the night sky: eclipses, aurora, meteor showers and certified dark-sky places. It also summarizes outdoor-lighting law by state and province.

The challenge

Reference sites live or die on trust. Increasingly the reader is an AI assistant, which pulls out one fact and hands it to someone else without the context around it.

That makes every sentence a potential quote. If a sentence says more than its evidence supports, it will eventually be repeated by something that doesn’t know the difference.

The choice: quote-bound facts

On The War On News, the rule is strict. Every fact rests on a verbatim quotation of up to 300 characters from a named source, shown with the source’s name, date and link. A statement may not say more than its quotation supports.

The rest of the standards follow from that:

• Entry rule. An incident goes in when two independent sources report it, or one primary document establishes it.
• Source ranking. Court records and primary documents first. Then established news reporting. Then press-freedom organizations. Blogs, advocacy statements and social posts can be the subject of an entry but never its evidence.
• No mind-reading. Entries record what was done and the reason the actor gave, both quoted. Loaded words appear only inside quotation marks.
• Corrections stay visible. A new statement replaces the old one, and the old text stays on the page with the date it was replaced. Entries are withdrawn with a note, never deleted.

Dark Skies Directory runs a lighter version of the same idea. Nothing is published without a source, and if a fact can’t be verified, it’s left out rather than guessed at. The sources are named: NASA, NOAA, the US Naval Observatory, DarkSky International, the meteor societies, the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, state legislatures and municipal codes. AI tools help with research and drafting, and a person decides what goes live.

The lighting-law table shows the approach most clearly. Each of the 64 jurisdictions gets one of three statuses (statewide law, local rules only, or no statewide law), a “last checked” date, and a link to the statute where one exists.

Built to be read by machines too

Both sites publish every page three ways: as a normal web page, as plain-text Markdown, and as structured data. The War On News also offers its whole record as an open data package under a Creative Commons licence, and a connection point for AI tools with exactly one write action: suggest a correction, which waits for review.

If an assistant is going to quote you, make the accurate version the easiest one to read.

What’s there now

• The War On News: 226 incidents, 997 claims, 625 sources and 59 countries.
• Dark Skies Directory: 212 certified dark-sky places, 77 sky events, lighting law for 64 jurisdictions and 21 long-form articles.

Early findings

Both sites are a matter of days old in Google’s eyes, so treat this as first light.

The War On News has Search Console data from September 21. By September 29 it had 2,420 impressions and 12 clicks, at an average position of 11.4. Some of the first clicks went to the oldest entries: the 1922 Soviet censorship office and the 1933 German editors’ law. Deep, specific history got found before anything topical.

Dark Skies Directory has data from September 24. By September 29 it had 510 impressions and 3 clicks. Two of those three clicks landed on state lighting-law pages, for Connecticut and Pennsylvania. That’s the table with a date on every row.

In Lighthouse on October 3, 2026, both scored 100 for desktop performance, and The War On News scored 100 in every category on mobile and desktop.

What we don’t know yet

We don’t know whether any AI assistant has cited either site. We have no evidence either way.

We don’t know yet whether strict sourcing helps rankings, or only helps trust. Our bet is that the two end up being the same thing: the page an assistant can quote without risk is the page it will prefer. That’s a bet, not a finding.

What it means for your site

Your site probably isn’t a reference work. But it makes claims: your hours, your prices, what you stock. Each is something an AI assistant might repeat to a customer.

So the same rule applies at small scale. Say only what you can back up. Put a date on things that change. When something changes, correct it in the open. A short page that’s right beats a long page that’s mostly right.

You can see both sites with our other builds on the examples page, and how we build them on how it works.