Approved Claim

What it is

An approved claim is a customer-facing statement that has been reviewed before it is published and carries a record of that review: what evidence sits behind it, when that evidence was last confirmed, and who is answerable for it. Review attaches to the statement rather than to the document it appears in, which is what lets the same sentence be reused across the website, a sales deck, a support macro and an AI-generated answer without being re-argued each time. In advertising, the FTC puts the obligation on the claim rather than the medium, expecting advertisers to substantiate "express and implied claims, however conveyed, that make objective assertions about the item or service advertised". That standard governs advertising rather than every customer-facing sentence, so it is the closest legal analogue to claim-level review, not a rule that reaches a support macro. Approving the words on the page is not the whole test either, because the obligation reaches claims a company never wrote down: firms "should generally be aware of reasonable interpretations and will be expected to have prior substantiation for such claims". Statement-level approval does not retire the finished piece as a unit. Under 21 CFR 314.81(b)(3)(i) an applicant must "submit specimens of mailing pieces and any other labeling or advertising devised for promotion of the drug product" at first use for a prescription drug product, and each submission has to be accompanied by a completed transmittal Form FDA-2253. That is a filing duty rather than an approval step, and it belongs to a different regime: under the standing memorandum of understanding between the two agencies, the FDA "has primary responsibility with respect to the regulation of the truth or falsity of prescription drug advertising". It is cited here only to show that the finished piece carries an obligation a claim record does not discharge.

Why it matters

Most companies approve pages and then lose track of the sentences inside them. When a fact changes, there is no way to ask which surfaces repeated it, so corrections are made where someone happens to notice and missed everywhere else. Approving at the claim level turns that into a lookup: change the record once and every surface built from it can be found and corrected. Knowledge Company keeps its own register this way, at knowledgecompany.ai/claims: every published claim carries its wording, the page it appears on, the date it was verified and the date that check expires, and all but one carry the record of what it was checked against. An owner is named on the dictionary rows and the /about row only; the blog, compare, pricing and other rows do not yet carry one. That is a gap in our register, not in the definition.