Why some fields say “Needs verification”

Sales intelligence tools have a bad habit: when they don't know, they guess — and you find out mid-call. Diurno HQ is built on the opposite bet. These rules are enforced in the product, not just promised:

• Research saves facts with their source. Signals, competitor evidence, people and enrichment answers that research produces are saved with the public URL they came from, and the Sources tab lists the pages research used. A signal or technology it can't source is kept as a Needs Verification lead, competitor evidence with no source is dropped, and a named person with neither a source nor a profile link becomes a role-based target, and one with only a profile link is kept as a Needs Verification lead. What you add by hand is stored as you entered it; a signal or a contact with no public source is labeled Needs Verification, and competitor evidence can't be added without a source URL.
• No source → no points. Unsourced claims are stored as “needs verification” and contribute zero to the score. Nothing verifies one later by itself; to make a lead count, add it again with a public source.
• Research doesn't invent people. It marks a named person Verified only with a source that proves it: a contact is Verified only when it has a public source link — a LinkedIn link alone leaves it Needs Verification, whether you add the person by hand or research found them (a LinkedIn page given as the source counts as the profile link, not as a source). People checks mark real departures as “Departed (verified)” on a sourced, confirmed or high-confidence claim instead of quietly keeping stale names; weaker moves are kept as leads. Prospector decision-makers follow the same rule: a name appears only with the public source that names them in the role — otherwise you get the title to look for, never a guessed person.
• Company facts need a source too. Research keeps an employee count, an “enterprise” label or a territory presence only when the answer gives a source URL for it.
• Undated is not new. Evidence whose source doesn't state a date isn't stamped “observed today”: it is scored as ageing (about six weeks old on the standard freshness windows; your own windows apply), and its detail says no publication date was found.
• Ambiguity fails honestly. If research can't be certain which company a common name refers to, the job fails and tells you — it doesn't guess and pollute your data.
• “No public evidence found” is a valid answer. In enrichment, it means research ran and found nothing citable — which is real information. The cell says only that; a sentence research couldn't source is never shown.
• Old news fades. Time decay quietly lowers what stale evidence is worth, so nobody has to remember to clean up.

What the labels mean