20,000 articles later, this is the ten-point check

The writing was never the hard part. The checking was.

Mastheads was refined across more than 20,000 published articles. That number taught us one thing above all others: models have produced decent prose for years. Verification is the hard part, and almost nobody does enough of it.

So here is the list. Ten questions to run on the last article published on your site, no matter who or what wrote it.

Mastheads answers all ten before a draft reaches you.

1. Did it read anything, or just remember?

Most AI writing is memory. The model says what it absorbed months ago and hopes it still holds.

Mastheads searches first and writes from what it finds. Research is on by default, and the sources appear on the article.

2. Will it say no?

This is the question almost nobody asks. A tool that always produces something will produce something even when it knows nothing about the topic.

Mastheads refuses. If the web does not support the brief, you get a plain sentence instead of an article:

No usable sources were found for this topic, so nothing was written.

Nothing is charged, because nothing was written.

3. Do two of your articles share a skeleton?

Article one looks great. Article forty opens the same way, turns the same way, and lands on the same note. Readers feel it before they can name it.

We saw that happen twice. The old engine asked the model to vary its openings, but articles still opened on a number. So we stopped asking.

The opening, the closer, the tone, and the structure are decided in code before the model writes a word.

4. Is every quotation real?

A made-up quote is the one mistake you cannot explain away.

Mastheads refuses to deliver an article containing an attributed quotation of twelve words or more unless it shares a consecutive five-word sequence with a source it retrieved.

Not flagged. Refused.

5. Does it tell you what it fell short on?

Every tool shows you the wins. Ask to see the shortfalls.

You set how many sources an article needs. If a run comes in under that number, the article says so in amber, in plain words:

Only 1 source of the 2 you asked for

You are told before you publish, not after somebody else notices.

6. Whose name is on it?

An article with no author is an article nobody is answerable for.

Mastheads gives every site a masthead: named authors and one editor of record who is accountable for the publication.

That name reaches the published article as a real byline.

7. Does it read like it was written there?

Translated English reads like translated English. Local readers can spot it in one line.

Mastheads writes to a country-specific newsroom register. German uses its own quotation marks, with the comma after the closing mark. A Swedish news story ends on the last fact, the way Swedish newsrooms end them, not the way an English one would.

Reading level is graded for the language and country, not borrowed from English.

8. Can anything publish without a person seeing it?

This is where tools quietly cost people their reputation.

Review before publishing is the default in Mastheads. Auto-publish is opt-in for each site. If you switch it on, it requires a named editor of record first.

9. Does it add words to your site that you never chose?

Small thing, real consequence. A tool that files an article under a section of its own invention has edited your navigation.

Mastheads matches the sections and tags your site already has. It creates none.

If nothing matches, the article files under nothing and your site's own default applies.

10. Can you see the work?

Not a score out of one hundred. The actual work: which sources were used, which checks were run, and which editor approved it.

Every Mastheads article carries that trail.

The legal side is handled the way it is actually written. There are two ways an article can publish, and they carry different duties. If nobody read it before it went out, it carries the AI disclosure the EU AI Act asks for. If you read it and pressed Publish yourself, it carries no label, because you are the review.

Ten points, ten articles

Run this check on ten articles from your own site this week. Most tools fail somewhere.

Mastheads runs all ten checks on every article.

New accounts get ten articles over seven days, free, with no card. Write a batch and check them against this list yourself.

That is the whole pitch.