Field notes. John Arndt, Soxoa. Published .
There's a moment in every small company's marketing when someone writes "trusted by hundreds of teams" because it sounds like what a real company would say. Then a ticker gets added. Then a toast that pops up saying someone in Ohio just signed up. Each one feels harmless. A careful buyer sees all of it, and once one claim looks invented, they stop believing the others.
claim-audit reads your site the way that buyer does. It asks two questions: does the page own one clear idea, and is every claim on it true and provable today?
Part one: positioning
The five-second test. Look only at the top of the homepage, then write down what a stranger would say it is, who it's for and why they'd pick it. If that differs from what the owner meant, that's the first finding, and usually the most important one.
Own a word. Name the one word or short phrase the brand could own in the buyer's mind, the open niche it could lead, and every competing idea on the page that dilutes it.
The 22 Laws. Grade the copy against Ries and Trout's 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. Each law gets PASS, WEAK or VIOLATION with one quoted line of evidence. It's an old book, and it still catches the most common mistake in AI-era marketing: trying to be everything at once.
Part two: the claim ledger
This part matters more. Every claim of fact on the site goes into a table: numbers, percentages, customer counts, logos, testimonials, case studies, awards, and words like compliant, certified, guaranteed and trusted by. Next to each one goes the evidence on hand and a verdict:
- Keep
- the evidence matches.
- Reword
- it's true but overstated. "Compliant" becomes what was actually observed. "Guaranteed" becomes what's actually promised.
- Remove
- there's no evidence.
Before the audit starts, the owner writes down what they can prove. Anything not on that list counts as unproven. That isn't hostility. It's the same standard a procurement team, a journalist or an annoyed customer will apply later.
Look in the metadata
Old positioning survives in page titles, search descriptions, social previews and structured data long after the visible copy changed. Those are often the first words a buyer sees, in a search result or a shared link. The audit checks them first.
No new claims
Replacement copy may only use facts from the evidence list. Sometimes the honest version is weaker. When that happens, the skill says so and offers a line about what you're building instead of inventing traction. A clear promise from a named person beats a fake number every time.
The audit ends with at most ten fixes, ranked, each with the page and the new copy, plus a short list of what already works and shouldn't be touched. It doesn't publish anything.
Get the skill
claim-audit is part of the free Soxoa Ops plugin for Claude. In Claude Code, add the marketplace with /plugin marketplace add johnarndt/soxoa-claude-plugins, then run /plugin install soxoa-ops@soxoa-plugins. You can read the skill on GitHub before installing it, or copy its folder into ~/.claude/skills/.