Integrity and Defense

Integrity · 2026-09-19

Objective

Protect the accuracy, provenance and trustworthiness of an entity's representation across search and AI discovery systems.

Threat model

VGO monitors risks such as:

  • false or misleading claims about an entity;
  • entity confusion, impersonation or misattribution;
  • low-quality duplicated content overwhelming higher-quality sources;
  • malicious or coordinated content intended to distort retrieval or generated answers;
  • compromised first-party pages or unauthorized changes;
  • stale facts continuing to propagate after official information changes;
  • fabricated citations, reviews, endorsements or consensus;
  • prompt-injection-like instructions embedded in content intended to manipulate downstream automated systems.

Defensive lifecycle

Baseline → Observe → Detect → Verify → Classify → Respond → Revalidate → Recover

Baseline

Maintain canonical facts, official URLs, entity identifiers, approved claims and high-confidence source references.

Observe

Sample search results, AI answers, citations, media mentions and relevant third-party sources over time.

Detect

Flag unusual changes in source mix, claim frequency, entity attributes, citation domains, sentiment-independent factual conflicts and sudden visibility spikes.

Verify

Do not label disagreement as poisoning automatically. Compare claims against provenance, timestamps, primary evidence and multiple credible sources.

Respond

Prefer legitimate corrective actions: update first-party evidence, request corrections where appropriate, publish transparent clarifications, repair compromised assets, improve structured/canonical signals and strengthen reputable corroboration.

Recover

Track whether inaccurate claims and untrusted-source exposure decline and whether correct canonical information returns across discovery surfaces.

Guardrails

VGO defense must not become offensive manipulation. It excludes hacking, harassment, fabricated counter-content, fake reviews, deceptive identity tactics, poisoning competitors, or attempts to bypass third-party safeguards.

Integrity scoring

Implementations may calculate an Integrity Score from factual consistency, provenance quality, source trust, anomaly incidence and recovery state. Exact scoring must be documented; uncertainty should remain visible.