Changes

Changes is the ledger of what you did about what the other lenses showed, and what happened next. It is the lens that separates this product from a reporting tool: a recommendation you shipped is not finished when you ship it, it is finished when the answers move.

What you'll learn

• The ladder a change climbs, and what each rung rests on
• The four states that stop a change climbing
• How to read the Review of a single change

Ledger, Review

The Ledger is every change, with its current tier. Open one and you get its Review: what it was, where it was made, the assertions that decide whether it did what it said, the journey it has taken, and our own fetch record. The proof lives inside the Review rather than on a page of its own, because the fetch record and the assertions are sections of the change, not a separate subject.

The ladder

Each rung is about evidence, not progress. "We fetched the page" is a different kind of claim from "step three of four", and the ledger only ever makes the first kind.

To reach confirmed, a change needs at least eight checks since it shipped, across at least two surfaces. Below that the sample cannot carry the conclusion, so the platform says so instead.

The four states that pre-empt the ladder

Drifted ranks above confirmed on purpose. A change that was measured as a win and whose page has since reverted must not keep rendering as a clean win. If you see drifted, someone edited or redeployed a page and took the change out with it.

Not measurable is the honest state, not the embarrassing one. See when a number is missing for the full list of reasons and what fixes each.

Where a change comes from

A change begins as a proposal against one of the four foundation levels of the six-level stack: Access, Structure, Authority or Citations. It carries the level it addresses, which is how the ledger can tell you whether you have been fixing crawlability for three months and never touched authority.

Nothing self-approves. A person approves a change, and the approval is what starts the clock and captures the control the outcome will be scored against.

Reading the Review

Four things to check, in this order:

1. Tier and basis. What is actually known about this change right now.
2. Assertions. What was supposed to become true on the page. These are what the fetch checks.
3. Journey. When it was proposed, approved, seen live, and measured.
4. Outcome against control. The movement, on the same metric as the baseline. A difference between two different measurements is not a difference, so mismatched metrics are reported as not measurable rather than subtracted.

Try this in Outercite

Open the Changes ledger and filter to Not measurable. Every reason listed there is a gap in your measurement loop, and most of them are closed by shipping the next change through the ledger.

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