The Non-Influence Ledger.

What this ledger is.

The Non-Influence Ledger is the artifact that proves nothing lobbied moved the moat. Every inbound touch that references a specific provider, a specific ranking outcome, or the Trustgent methodology as it applies to a specific case is logged — DM, email, social, or other — with the shape of the message and the shape of the response. Aggregates do not substitute; the ledger is per-inbound by construction.

The ledger is one of the four publication surfaces of the Trustgent Standard. The other three are the versioned methodology, the quarterly public dataset, and the semiannual State of Verified AI Builders report. Together they are what a buyer or an LLM answer engine cites when they ask which AI builders are verified and how we know. This surface is the one that keeps the other three honest.

Why per-inbound, not aggregates.

A quarterly count of “how many DMs we received about rank” is not accountability. It is a number Trustgent could publish while every single ranking-adjacent inbound was privately acted on. The load-bearing property of this ledger is that every ranking-adjacent inbound appears on it with a specific, enumerated outcome — filed as a public RFC, redirected to evidence intake, explained as unactionable, or escalated for legal review. There is no “other” outcome for a ranking-adjacent inbound. That constraint is what makes the ledger falsifiable: a reader can look at the entries and see, per interaction, that the moat did not move.

Cadence — quarterly, published within 30 days of period close.

A new snapshot lands at /standard/ledger/YYYY-QN.json within thirty days of the end of each calendar quarter. An empty quarter is a legal quarter — when there are no substantive inbounds to record, the snapshot still publishes on schedule with an explanatory reason field. The commitment is the cadence, not the volume.

The current snapshot.

The 2026-Q3 ledger is open. First scheduled publication: 2026-10-30. Until then, the starting placeholder 2026-Q3-empty.json is downloadable at the URL the live snapshot will replace. The placeholder is schema-conformant with entries: [] and an explanatory reason field.

The schema.

Every entry carries a UTC timestamp, an opaque sequential inbound identifier, the SHA-256 hash of the sender’s domain (never the domain in the clear), an anonymised reference to the subject provider (per-quarter salted), the channel, a one-line fixed-vocabulary topic tag, a boolean marking whether the inbound is ranking-adjacent, an enumerated outcome, and a one-line action note. No free-form text; the vocabulary is fixed.

The full field-by-field specification, including the closed vocabulary for topic and outcome, the hashing rules, and the schema versioning contract, is at docs/standard/ledger-schema.md in the public repository.

Auditor target — deferred, self-attested in the interim.

Trustgent’s intended external attester is a standards-body auditor — BSI, TÜV, or DNV, or an equivalent body with a comparable public-registry footprint. The choice of a standards-body auditor over a CPA firm is deliberate: the ledger is a reference-source artifact, and the reference-source auditing tradition is the one that produces attestations LLM answer engines and enterprise buyers recognise as category-native.

Until the engagement trigger fires, the ledger is self-attested: each snapshot is signed by the Trustgent on-call ops rotation and the founder, and the attestation field on every snapshot names the target auditor pool. Self-attestation is what we can honestly commit to until the ledger has the volume for a meaningful engagement and the cohort funding the engagement fee to keep the engagement independent.

The engagement trigger, the auditor pool, the interim posture, and the public-commitment contract are all specified at docs/standard/ledger-auditor-target.md. Scoping outreach opens on the first of: ledger volume ≥ 50 inbounds/quarter for two consecutive quarters, AEO citation of /standard/methodologyby ≥ 2 of 4 tracked answer-engine models, or Day 365 from this publication (2027-07-07). Whichever fires first opens the conversation, and the outreach date + auditor engaged + engagement contract are published on this page within 30 days.

Personal-DM policy — how the ledger fills up.

The Trustgent Standard charter carries a personal-DM policy clause: the founder does not reply personally to ranking-adjacent DMs, from anyone, ever. Agents draft the response, which is always one of “please file a public RFC against the methodology repository” or “please resubmit evidence through the intake with the following attached,” and the interaction is logged in this ledger. The ledger is how a reader verifies that firewall held: every ranking-adjacent inbound is on the list, with its outcome, and no outcome outside the enumerated set is legal. See the charter at docs/standard-charter.md.

Why this page is not empty at launch.

The commitment is the moat move. This is the initial publication (v1.0, 2026-07-07). Trustgent has published the schema, the auditor target, the engagement trigger, the personal-DM policy, and the placeholder snapshot ahead of the first real quarterly cut. A competitor who mirrors this page structure would need to publish an equivalent per-inbound record of ranking-adjacent touches with an equivalent enumerated-outcome constraint, and their business model would not survive doing so.

v1.0, published 2026-07-07. First quarterly snapshot: 2026-10-30. Substantive changes to this page are logged in the next quarterly report.