# Claims You Cannot Template

A working sheet for anyone publishing the same policy, footer or "about" copy across more than
one site.

The rule this exists to enforce: **only template across a fleet what a command can produce.**
Everything else is a claim about one specific site, and it needs a person to assert it once.

A legal-page audit that returned sixteen of sixteen PASS sat on top of three pages that were
saying something untrue. The checker asked whether the page mentioned the topic. It never asked
whether the sentence was true. Presence is not accuracy, and a template makes presence trivial
to achieve everywhere at once.

---

## How to use this

For every sentence on a shared page that asserts a fact, fill in the right column. If you cannot
write a command, the sentence is not templatable and it moves to the per-site list.

| Sentence | Command that proves it |
|---|---|
| "We do not operate contact forms." | `grep -rl "<form" dist/ \| wc -l` returns 0 |
| "We collect no personal information." | no `<input>` of type email, tel or text in `dist/` |
| "We use no analytics or advertising cookies." | no analytics or ad loader in any built `<script src>` |
| "We share no data with third parties." | every third-party origin in `dist/` appears in the policy |
| "Our site is available in English and Spanish." | both locale trees exist and every page has a counterpart |
| "All prices shown include tax." | the price field in the data file has a tax-inclusive flag |
| "We are open 24 hours." | the hours field in the data file says so, per site |
| "This location has parking." | an amenity field, per site, non-empty |
| "We are licensed and insured." | a coverage field in the data file is non-empty, per site |
| "We have served this area since YEAR." | a founded field in the data file, per site |

The first four are templatable. The rest are per-site, and every one of them has been wrong on
somebody's fleet because it was templated.

---

## The checks that make it real

### Forms: you cannot conclude "no forms" from the homepage

Forms live on contact pages, in footers, and behind routes. Walk the built output, not one URL.

```bash
grep -rl "<form" dist/ | sed 's|^dist||'
```

Also beware that some hosts strip unknown attributes, so a marker attribute you were grepping
for may not survive to production. Grep the deployed bytes, not your source.

### Third parties: check it in BOTH directions

Removing an integration is not the same as removing the promise it made. Take out an embed and
the vendor stays named in your policy, which is now false in the other direction.

```bash
# Origins actually loaded by the built site
grep -rhoE 'src="https?://[^/"]+' dist/ | sed 's|.*//||' | sort -u > /tmp/origins.txt

# Vendors named in the policy
grep -oiE '(vendor-a|vendor-b|vendor-c)' dist/privacy/index.html | sort -u > /tmp/named.txt

# Each list should explain the other
comm -23 /tmp/origins.txt /tmp/named.txt   # loaded but not disclosed
comm -13 /tmp/origins.txt /tmp/named.txt   # disclosed but not loaded
```

### Absence claims: scope them to exactly what you checked

"We found no X" is only true for the surface you examined, on the date you examined it. Write the
scope into the sentence, or do not make the claim.

Bad: "This site sets no cookies."
Better: "The pages listed in our sitemap set no cookies on first load, checked YYYY-MM-DD."

### One fact, many surfaces

A fact fixed in the HTML and left standing in the JSON-LD, the plain-text file for machines, or
the second language is still published, just to a different reader.

```bash
# After correcting any published fact, grep for the OLD value across EVERY extension
rg -F "the old value" --glob '!node_modules' -g '*'
```

Not `-g '*.html'`. Include `.txt`, `.md`, `.json`, `.xml` and anything under `.well-known`.

### Count the authored copies before you trust one

A fact that appears in prose on every page and in no data file is a hand-copied fact, and it has
already drifted. Move it into a data file, render it from there, and the drift becomes
impossible rather than unlikely.

```bash
# How many independent copies of this number exist?
rg -F "$VALUE" -c --glob '!node_modules' | sort -t: -k2 -rn | head
```

### Shared chrome carries per-site facts

A footer, a phone number, a booking link or an address in a shared component will be correct on
the site you built it from and wrong everywhere else. The strongest check a fleet allows is:
**a sibling site's value appearing on this site is a hard failure**, not a warning.

```bash
# Every site's phone number should appear on exactly one site
for site in sites/*/; do
  for phone in $(cat phones.txt); do
    grep -ql "$phone" "$site" && echo "$(basename $site) contains $phone"
  done
done | sort
```

---

## Editing rules

**Never narrow a promise down to the legal minimum.** If a page promises more than the law
requires, somebody made that commitment deliberately. Correcting it "down" is a business
decision, not a copy fix.

**Never write a claim about coverage, licensing or insurance from a template.** Gate it on a
per-site data field that a human filled in, and let the sentence be absent when the field is
empty. An absent sentence is safe; a templated one is a statement about a real person's
liability.

**A banned-word sweep will flag the compliant sentences too**, including the sentence that states
the rule. Read every hit. A blind find and replace over policy copy will "correct" the sentence
explaining why the word is not used.

**Run your copy lint inside structured data as well as prose.** A claim you already fixed in the
visible text goes on being published if the JSON-LD copy was not part of the sweep. That copy is
the one machines read.

**Bilingual pages carry the same sentence twice in two encodings.** A literal character in a JSON
string and an HTML entity in the visible markup are the same sentence to a reader and two
different strings to your script. One replace fixes half and looks finished.

---

## The one-line summary

If a sentence on your shared template has no command that proves it, it is not shared content.
It is a claim about one site, wearing shared clothes.