By Ryan Richardson · Published 8 October 2026
One documented never-say list runs to sixteen banned claims, settled before a word of the asset was drafted. Examples from that list: any price for a service that lives only on the site, not in print; any form of a tenure claim that overstates how long the business itself has existed versus the industry tenure of the person running it; anything about events ruled entirely out of scope; and any claim that the prose was typed untouched, when it was drafted under a brief and checked line by line.
Each line on the list exists because it would read as true for a while and cost something real the first time it was checked.
Keep a claim map beside the exclusion list: one row per factual claim, pointing to the exact line on the page that backs it. If there's no line to point at, the claim comes out, however true it happens to be. Regulators in more than one jurisdiction have levied penalties running into the tens of thousands of dollars per violation for undisclosed or fabricated reviews, and into the millions in aggregate for persistent breaches, which is the exposure a claim map exists to manage, not a benchmark to chase.
A written list exists, dated before drafting starts, with every line tested on substantiation rather than how it sounds. A claim map sits beside it, one row per factual claim, each pointing to the line that proves it. Nothing gets added to either document after a draft already exists and needs defending.
| Claim | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Number of banned claims on a documented never-say list | 16 | The Sixty Steps manuscript |
| Penalty range for undisclosed or fabricated reviews in some jurisdictions | tens of thousands of dollars per violation, millions in aggregate for persistent breaches | Measured in Real Money, Field Manual |
| Matrix difficulty/coverage for this step | Easy / Almost nobody does this | The Sixty Steps matrix |