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. 125 citation chains traced from 20 SaaS blog domains (140 posts, 941 total claims). Each chain followed hop by hop until reaching a terminus: primary source, claim not found, paywalled, named without link, broken, or circular. No intervention. No control group. Descriptive statistics with bootstrap 95% confidence intervals.

Claims extracted via LiquiChart claim extraction pipeline from the longitudinal study corpus (140 posts across 20 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. Bootstrap CIs (10,000 iterations) computed for all primary metrics.