Every CTI finding stays traceable to the evidence behind it.

Commercial Transformation Index data comes from four sources, and each is classified before it is used. Observed evidence is gathered from what an organisation makes public, such as its website and the signals AI systems and search engines can read from it. Self-reported evidence is what a participant states during an assessment. Validated evidence has been reviewed by an assessor in a Full CTI Audit. Source-specific evidence comes from named external market, economic and sector sources. Every published figure names the classes behind it.

Observed evidence is externally observable signals gathered through scans and public sources: what an organisation states publicly about who it serves, what it solves and why, and what a machine can extract from that. It is gathered the way any visitor or search engine would see it, so it needs no access and no permission, and it describes the organisation at the time it was observed.

Self-reported evidence is what a participant states about their own commercial system during an assessment. It is a legitimate evidence class, and it is never presented as audited fact: a finding that rests on it is labelled self-reported wherever it appears. Combined with observed evidence it supports the indicative result of the Commercial Maturity Assessment.

Validated CTI evidence is evidence an assessor has reviewed against supporting material in a Full CTI Audit. It is the highest CTI confidence tier and the only class that supports a validated Commercial Maturity Band and a CTI Score. Because it requires assessor review, it exists for assessed organisations rather than for a market at large.

Source-specific evidence is evidence from external market, economic and sector sources, including a named source whose own evidence the Commercial Transformation Index interprets through its methodology. What it can establish depends on the source and its provenance, so it is published with the source named and attributed. It frames a finding and never establishes anything about a specific organisation on its own.

Only what an organisation provides during its own assessment. That evidence belongs to the organisation and is private by default. It contributes to aggregated research only where research use has been agreed, which is recorded as a consent separate from the consent that delivers the assessment itself.

No. An individual assessment result is private by default and stays in the assessment environment. CTIndex.org publishes aggregated findings about defined populations, not individual organisations, results or scores. There is no mechanism on CTIndex.org for publishing an individual result.

Published figures are aggregates over a cohort of assessed organisations, not individual records. Before an aggregate can be published, cohort suppression rules are applied in the assessment environment: where a cohort is too small for a figure to describe a population rather than the organisations in it, the figure is suppressed, and any publication drawing on that cohort states that suppression was applied.

The population is the group a figure claims to describe, stated beside every published figure as its population label. The sample is the number of organisations the evidence was actually drawn from, stated as n where a count is meaningful. The cohort is the set of assessed organisations a finding is drawn from, defined by shared characteristics such as sector, size band or market region. A CTI cohort is made of organisations that chose to be assessed and is not a random sample of a market.

Every Commercial Transformation Index publication states the population its figures describe, the evidence classes they rest on, the period they cover and the limitations of what they can establish. Every chart carries its source, period and sample note. Publication fails where any of these is missing, so no statistical claim is rendered without its sample context.

Large enough to clear the cohort suppression rules applied in the CTI assessment environment before a publication is produced. The rules exist so that a figure describes a population rather than the organisations in it; where a cohort does not clear them, the figure is suppressed and the publication says so. The rules are applied before publication, not chosen once a result is known.

Every Commercial Transformation Index publication states the period its evidence covers and carries a publication date and a modified date. Observed evidence describes the organisation at the time it was observed; self-reported and validated evidence describe the assessment period. A reader can therefore judge whether a figure still applies before using it.

A substantive revision creates a new version of the publication, advances its modified date and may carry a revision note. A finding that can no longer be supported is withdrawn: the record is retained and the reason for withdrawal is stated, so a citation never points at a silently deleted page. A publication that has been superseded identifies the publication that replaces it.

Provenance is the record of where a finding came from: its source, the methodology version it was produced under, the period it covers, the population it describes, the evidence classes behind it and the limits of what it can establish. The Commercial Transformation Index carries provenance with every published figure, which is what lets a figure be quoted accurately, challenged specifically and cited.

As part of what the finding means. A self-reported figure describes what participants reported. An observed figure describes what was visible at the time. A cohort figure describes the assessed organisations, not the market they sit in. A source-specific figure depends on its source. Reading a finding within its stated limits is what makes it usable in a decision that somebody else will examine.