Seges Verify's methodology isn't a gut call — it rests on explicit academic and standards grounding.
- Akerlof (1970) — The market for "lemons" & information asymmetry
- When buyers can't tell good businesses from bad ones, low-quality sellers can crowd out good ones. Independent verification exists to surface information the seller already has but the buyer can't see.
- Darby & Karni (1973) — Credence goods
- Services like renovation and electrical work — and, just as much, a meal at a restaurant or software you didn't write yourself — are classic "credence goods": even after the transaction, a customer often still can't judge the quality. External verification fills exactly that gap.
- ISO/IEC 17000 series (17020, 17024, 17025, 17065)
- The internationally recognized conformity-assessment standards, defining the independence, competence, and process a verification body should have. Seges Verify's methodology follows the same logic: check only what's checkable (registration, physical existence, disciplinary record) — never endorse marketing claims, never sell a score.
- Bazaarvoice / IDC (2026)
- 73% of consumers trust independent third-party verification over a merchant's own claims, and shoppers are 81% more likely to transact with a business carrying a verification badge — the evidence behind our bet that honest checking is itself commercially valuable.
- Schrobback, Prawira & Meyer (2023) — Food credence attributes
- Food safety and quality are "credence attributes": even a satisfied customer usually can't verify them from a single visit. The literature's answer is third-party attribute-assurance systems — audits, certifications, public registration — the same structure this checklist applies to food businesses (published in Foods, 2023). Taiwan's own Food Business Operator Registration (食品業者登錄, mandatory since 2014) is exactly this kind of public, checkable registration record.
- Vibe-coding security incidents (2025) — Replit, Wiz Research
- The rapid rise of AI-agent-built ("vibe-coded") software surfaced real, publicly documented trust failures in 2025: an AI coding agent deleted a live production database mid-project (widely reported, July 2025), and independent research by Wiz found roughly 1 in 5 organizations building on vibe-coding platforms exposed hardcoded secrets or unauthenticated internal apps (September 2025). This is why the AI-built-software checklist below checks for a real registered operator, a published privacy policy, a security contact, and incident-disclosure history — the same checkable-facts-only discipline as every other vertical.