What is the fact gate?
The fact gate is a structural check on drafts. Before a page, a reply, a brief, or any written proposal from a Digital FTE reaches a human approver, every factual claim in it is checked against the sources the organization has approved: its own documentation and policy pages, the data in its connected systems, and named public sources. A claim that traces to none of them blocks the draft, which is returned to the FTE with the blocked sentence identified.
The term names the position as much as the function: it is a gate the draft has to pass, placed before the approval gate, so that what a person reviews has already been checked for sourcing and their attention can go to judgement and tone.
How does the fact gate work on ftes.ai?
On ftes.ai the fact gate runs on every draft from the Search Visibility, Content, Social Growth, and Research Analyst roles, and on any written proposal that will leave the organization. The approved sources are set per property in Setup: the product documentation, the policy pages, the knowledge base, the brand guidelines, and the public sources the manager has named. The Brand Brain's confirmed facts count as sources too, which is why reviewing the memory at hiring matters.
A draft that fails comes back to the FTE, not to the manager. The FTE revises by removing the claim or replacing it with what a source supports, and the revised draft's fact-gate result, including what was blocked and how it was resolved, is attached to the proposal in Approvals.
Why is the fact gate the honest answer to hallucination?
It is the honest answer because hallucination, meaning confident text with no basis in the sources, is a property of language models and cannot be prompted away. A workflow that relies on the model never being wrong will eventually publish something false. A workflow that checks every claim structurally does not depend on the model at all; it depends on the sources, which the organization controls.
The gate also catches a subtler failure than invention: a true claim attached to the wrong source, or a source that does not quite say what the draft says. Because the check is per claim against a specific passage, that mismatch fails too.
What passes and what does not?
A description of your product drawn from your documentation passes. A price drawn from the current fee schedule passes. A public fact drawn from a named public source passes with the source cited. A mechanism described from the platform's own behaviour passes. An outcome claim, a comparative claim, a statistic, or a quotation with no approved source does not pass, however plausible it reads.
In regulated sectors the gate turns advertising rules into a mechanical check: a healthcare practice or an education institution sets which sources are approved, and a claim about effectiveness or employment outcomes cannot reach approval without one.
- Passes: product facts, prices, dates, and mechanisms from approved sources
- Passes: public facts with the named source cited
- Blocked: statistics, studies, customers, quotes with no approved source
- Blocked: comparative and outcome claims without a source
What is the fact gate often confused with?
It is confused with the approval gate, which is a different checkpoint: the approval gate is a person deciding whether an action happens; the fact gate is a check on whether a draft's claims are sourced, and it runs first. It is also confused with a spell-check or a style pass; it checks facts against sources, not grammar against rules.
It is sometimes assumed to check truth in the abstract. It does not; it checks traceability to sources you approved. If an approved source is wrong, a claim from it passes, which is why the sources and the Brand Brain are reviewed at hiring and corrected as proposals reveal errors.
Where do you see it in the workspace?
Each written proposal in the Approvals tab carries its fact-gate result: the claims checked, any that were blocked in an earlier draft, and how the revision resolved them. The approved source list is in Setup per property. Over a quarter, a role that keeps being blocked on the same kind of claim is telling you a source needs adding or a memory item needs correcting.
Related terms: approval gate, Brand Brain, approved sources, send-back, worth-it verdict.