Verifying an Agent-Generated Page

Verification metadata is the agent's confidence signal. A page marked authoritative was vetted recently by a trusted author; provisional means AI-generated or unverified; stale means verified once but more than 90 days ago.

When to use this runbook

After spot-checking a page, when the act of marking it verified is the next step.

Context

mark_page_verified writes verified_at = NOW() and verified_by = <exchange author> into the page's frontmatter. The structural-index post-save event syncs the values to the page_verification table, where ConfidenceComputer reads them along with the trusted_authors registry to compute the effective confidence. Trusted-author + recent verification = authoritative. Either condition missing = provisional. > 90 days old = stale.

Walkthrough

The frontmatter steps are the canonical sequence. The trusted-author check (step 2) is the most-overlooked: a verification call from a non-trusted author still lands the timestamp but confidence stays provisional.

Pitfalls

The frontmatter pitfalls capture the failure modes. Mass-verifying without reading is the most damaging — once the signal is poisoned, agents stop trusting it.