The 90-second
verification.

A pitch lands. The reporter is interested enough to check. What happens next is not a deep investigation. It is a fast, practiced scan, and most companies fail it without ever knowing they were tested.

The scan, in order.

Your homepage. Can they say what you do in one sentence after one read? If they cannot, the story just got harder to write, and harder stories lose to easier ones.

The claim itself. You said fastest, first, largest, only. Where is the evidence a third party can inspect? A claim that only you can verify is, to a reporter, not yet a fact. It is a quote at best.

Search. They search your company name. Whatever comes up is your record, whether you wrote it or not. Old pricing, a stale team page, an abandoned product name, a founder bio that disagrees with the pitch. Each mismatch costs you.

AI answers. Increasingly, the first description a reporter reads is not written by you or by them. It is assembled by an AI system from whatever public evidence exists. If that description is wrong, you are now spending your 90 seconds correcting a machine instead of telling your story.

The people. Who can they call who is not you? A customer, an investor, a named expert. No third voice means a one-source story, and one-source stories get cut.

Reporters do not fact-check you as a courtesy. They fact-check you as a filter.

Passing before you pitch.

The fix is not better pitching. It is entering the scan already clean: one sentence that travels, claims with inspectable evidence attached, a public record that agrees with itself, AI answers that describe you accurately, and third parties ready to speak.

That is exactly what the Trustability Index measures, across clarity, proof, authority, discoverability, and consistency. Run it before the pitch, not after the pass.