Citation Provenance Trace: Where Do SaaS Blog Citations Lead?

The majority of citation chains in SaaS blog content terminate before reaching a primary source with documented methodology. Mean chain depth is shallow (under 2 hops), and the dominant failure mode is pages that return 200 OK but no longer contain the cited value.

Cross-sectional observational study. 1,006 verified linked citations traced from 46 SaaS blog domains (961 posts, 5,034 total claims) on the current production tracer, including the hop-relevance gate. Each chain followed hop by hop until reaching a terminus: primary source, claim not found, access blocked, named without link, broken, or circular. No intervention. No control group. Descriptive statistics with Wilson 95% confidence intervals.

Claims extracted via LiquiChart claim extraction pipeline from the 46-domain corpus (961 posts across 46 SaaS blog domains). Claims with external source URLs filtered and deduplicated. Each source URL fetched, searched for the cited value, and classified by terminus type. Multi-hop chains followed until terminus. JS-rendered pages, compound values, and social share links excluded from the clean dataset. Wilson 95% confidence intervals computed for all primary metrics.