Business Truth is the fact set every later stage checks against.
Seven confirmed fields — name, industry, services, areas served, country, language and existing site — form the record that industry research, service validation and website hierarchy analysis all test their findings against. Nothing downstream overrides a confirmed fact; it only adds evidence within the boundary that fact sets.
What counts as Business Truth
A fact belongs in Business Truth when the business owner states it directly, not when a search result or an industry pattern implies it.
The seven starting fields and why each one constrains the pipeline
| Field | Why it matters downstream |
|---|
| Business name | Anchors entity matching against the Knowledge Graph and prevents brand drift across pages |
| Primary industry or niche | Scopes which service families entity research is allowed to surface |
| Confirmed services | Defines which search queries can pass service validation |
| Areas served | Sets the boundary location pages are tested against during hierarchy analysis |
| Country and language | Determines which regulatory and terminology conventions apply during research |
| Existing website | Gives hierarchy analysis a current structure to compare against, not a blank slate |
| Proposed website structure | Becomes the first draft hierarchy analysis scores, rather than an assumption |
Confirmation comes before research, not after
Industry research can surface a service a business hasn't mentioned — a roofer's site might imply guttering work, a plumber's job history might show drain camera inspections. That surfaced concept becomes a candidate, not a fact. It moves through service discovery and waits for evidence or owner confirmation before it reaches the site as a claim. A tool that skips this step publishes services a business doesn't actually provide, and a homeowner who books on that claim finds out the gap at the worst possible moment.
How one field constrains three later stages
- Confirmed services filter which industry-research concepts service validation is allowed to accept — a concept outside the stated niche gets flagged, not folded in automatically.
- Areas served sets the radius search demand research treats as relevant; a query from outside that radius doesn't count toward justifying a page.
- Existing website gives hierarchy analysis a baseline; without it, every page decision starts from zero instead of from what's already live.
Business Truth changes, and the pipeline follows
A business that adds a service, drops a location or rebrands doesn't need a new project — it needs an updated Business Truth record. Later stages re-run against the new boundary rather than carrying forward decisions made under the old one, which is why REVIEW exists: a page justified under last year's service list may need re-evaluating under this year's.
Updating an area served triggers a fresh hierarchy analysis pass on location pages inside the new boundary — existing pages don't get grandfathered in without evidence.
From confirmed facts to industry context
Once the seven fields are recorded, entity and industry research maps what the stated trade actually contains — the service families, materials and terminology a keyword list alone would miss.
See how industry research works.