77% of traced citation chains ended at pages with vanished data, paywalls, or secondary sources pointing to other secondary sources

We measured citation chain depth across 20 SaaS blog domains: how many hops separate a published claim from its original source. Only 23% of 125 traced chains reached a primary source. The rest ended at pages where the data had vanished, sat behind a paywall, or pointed to another secondary source that pointed to another secondary source that pointed to nothing.