A tool that finds nothing and a tool that is broken file exactly the same report.
Last week an automated sweep told me a claim on a homepage did not exist. Zero pages carry it, it said, with the calm authority of a smoke alarm whose battery went missing in 2019. The claim was on the homepage. Large type, directly above the review badges, where it had been sitting for months.
The tool was not lying. It was hunting for the sentence as one continuous run of text, and the page had put the number in a little box of its own. The words went one way, the figure went the other, and the search strolled straight down the gap between them without touching either.
Here is the part that should worry anyone running checks at scale.
A zero is the easiest result in the world to believe. It arrives tidy. Nothing found, nothing to fix, tick the box and move on to something that actually needs you. A false alarm gets argued with, because somebody has to go and look at the thing. A false all-clear gets filed and thanked. Nobody launches an investigation into good news.
So a true claim was quietly closed as unevidenced, and it would have stayed closed if a human had not looked at the page with their own eyes the next morning.
The rule I run now is short. A zero on something you have never seen rendered is not a finding. It is an untested tool writing a reference for itself.
An empty result is not proof the thing is missing. It is proof your search came back empty, and those are two very different sentences wearing the same coat.