Every article on CR Today is paired with multiple external sources from a curated authority whitelist. This page describes how that system works and what we do when a claim cannot be verified.
Primary sources first
For YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) topics — finance, cryptocurrency, regulatory matters — we require primary sources: SEC and FINRA filings, Federal Reserve publications, CFTC notices, and official exchange data (NYSE, Nasdaq). Our automated source-attachment system (cr-related-sources) includes sec.gov, finra.org, federalreserve.gov, cftc.gov, nyse.com, and nasdaq.com in the authority whitelist for these categories.
Multi-source verification
Articles in YMYL categories (stock-news, crypto-news) automatically receive at least three external links to whitelisted authority domains. Non-YMYL articles receive the same three-link minimum drawn from category-specific whitelists — for example, ESPN, BBC Sport, Sky Sports, The Athletic for sports; Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone for entertainment; TechCrunch, The Verge, MIT Technology Review for tech.
Authority source system
The cr-related-sources system queries Google’s organic search results (via DataForSEO) for each article’s topic, filters those results against the category-keyed whitelist, validates each URL via HTTP HEAD probe, and selects the top three for inclusion. Each whitelisted domain meets one of these criteria: Ahrefs Domain Rating ≥ 80, Moz Domain Authority ≥ 80, or primary-source status (regulatory body, governing organization, official institutional site).
Link verification & dead-link recovery
External links are validated at insertion time with a browser-like HTTP probe. A weekly background job re-checks a sample of previously inserted links and re-runs the source-attachment pipeline for any article whose links return 404 or 410 status codes.
When a claim cannot be verified
If no whitelisted authority source can be matched to an article’s topic, the cr-related-sources system skips that article entirely — no “further reading” block is rendered. If a reader reports a factual error in an article that did receive sources, we follow the Corrections Policy: review within 2 business days, correct or retract, and document the change.