The NeedSignal Standard v1

Every NeedSignal Report must clear the same six quality gates before it ships. The gate results are printed on the report itself — your client does not have to take anyone's word for the rigor; they can read it. A report that cannot clear the gates is returned as Insufficient Evidence — documenting exactly what's missing — never padded to a conclusion.

The six published gates

• SOURCES ≥ 10 — at least ten independent sources retrieved and captured before analysis.
• TIER A/B ≥ 4 — at least four Tier A (primary/official) or Tier B (authoritative secondary) sources.
• CLAIMS ≥ 8 — at least eight extracted claims, each with quoted span and source link.
• COUNTER-CASE — the adversarial pass ran to completion: ranked risks, contradicting evidence, kill criteria.
• SCORING v1.0 — the versioned, deterministic 8-component scoring rubric.
• PROVENANCE — every source stored with URL, content hash, and retrieval date; no orphan claims.

The Insufficient-Evidence guarantee: if any gate fails, the report ships as Insufficient Evidence with the gap documented, and the free guided re-run on your refined question is on us.