Methodology
The source comes before the summary.
A polished explanation cannot repair weak evidence. Four fixed stages take a public page from capture to Friday's brief.
- 1
Namecurate
A versioned Source Pack records each canonical page, why it is included, and its review status.
- 2
Watchcompare
Captured content is canonicalised and compared deterministically. Unchanged sources stop here.
- 3
Verifyverify
Prices, limits and plan names are checked against before-and-after evidence before a claim is approved.
- 4
Readbrief
Verified changes enter the weekly brief. Interpretation stays separate, labelled and cautious.
Name, Watch and Read are the three steps on the front page. Verify is the stage between them that turns a diff into a receipt.
Two kinds of sentence, never mixed.
Verify decides which sentence a reader gets. The observed record and its possible significance never share a voice.
Observed fact
“Growth rose from £79 to £99 per month.”
Exact values only. Each claim links to its before-and-after capture, source URL and immutable hash.
Possible significance
“This may anchor their move upmarket. Worth checking your comparison page.”
Hedged, optional and visually separate. A question for your team — it can never overwrite the captured record.
How the method holds up.
How does DeltaChime detect a change?
Four fixed stages. Curate: each competitor's canonical commercial pages are recorded in a versioned Source Pack with a reason for inclusion. Compare: captured content is canonicalised and compared deterministically, so unchanged sources stop early. Verify: structured prices, limits and plan names are checked against the before-and-after captures. Brief: only verified changes reach the weekly brief or an urgent Chime.
What does “evidence-backed” mean in practice?
Every observed claim links to its captured before-and-after evidence, the capture timestamps and a SHA-256 content hash. Interpretation — what a change might mean commercially — is optional, hedged and kept visually and structurally separate from the captured record. A polished explanation is never allowed to repair weak evidence.
How are false positives handled?
Canonicalisation strips cosmetic churn — markup noise, rotating tracking parameters, reordered attributes — before anything is compared, and a change only ships after its structured values verify against both captures. An unverified delta is not published. The same bar applies in reverse: a competitor is only reported as quiet when coverage was complete, fresh and failure-free.
What is the robots and politeness policy?
Capture requests respect robots.txt (evaluated per RFC 9309), identify themselves, and run at low, tier-capped rates rather than hammering a site. DeltaChime does not automate CAPTCHA, challenge or access-control bypass: a source that blocks retrieval stays blocked or moves to manual review. Public pages only — no logins, no private sessions.