Where the numbers in a draft come from

The writer has one rule about numbers. A price, percentage, count, date, duration or size may be written only if it appears in your answers, in your brand details, or in a sentence copied from an approved source page. If it comes from a source page, that page must be linked in the same sentence. Anything else is to be said in words, without the number. Rounding, averaging and combining figures into a new one are not allowed.

To make that possible, Blogo reads the approved source pages before writing (up to eight of them) and copies out sentences that contain a figure and mention the topic, a few per page. The writer sees those sentences with their addresses. Figures in the general research notes may be used only if they also appear in one of these copied sentences.

Once the draft exists, code goes through it sentence by sentence, treating each table row and list item as its own unit. For every unit that contains a figure:

Not every digit needs a source. Amounts with a currency, a percent sign or a unit always do. Small bare counts such as “3 steps”, numbered list positions, the current year, and numbers that are part of a product name are left alone.

Matching is exact. Thousands separators and trailing zeros are ignored, so 1,000 matches 1000, but nothing is rounded. Example: if the source says 24.6% and the draft says “about 25%”, the draft’s figure is not found and the sentence is reported.

Before the automatic fix runs, the review shows a short list headed “Do you know these numbers?”, with up to five of the unsupported sentences. For each one you can type your real figure or choose “I don’t know”.

A real answer becomes part of your own evidence: the fix can then use that number, and it is saved for later articles on the same site. With “I don’t know”, the fix is told to make the point without the number, or delete the sentence if nothing useful is left, and not to swap in wording such as “varies by supplier”.

The check confirms that the linked page states the figure. It does not judge whether that page is right, or whether the figure is used in the same sense.

If a linked page cannot be read, the figure counts as unsourced. That includes pages that block automated readers, time out, or are not ordinary web pages. Links to your own site do not count as a source for a figure, and a draft has a ceiling of 15 linked pages read for this check.