Canonical Source
The version of a fact a system treats as authoritative.
Industry Term
Full explanation
A canonical source is the source a brand identifies, or that a system treats, as the authoritative version of a particular fact, claim, or description, used when other representations conflict.
It can be designated deliberately, a brand explicitly marking its own site or a specific page as the authoritative source via canonical tags or structured data, or it can emerge by default, when a system simply treats whichever source it encountered as most authoritative, most consistent, or most frequently corroborated as the one to trust when others disagree.
A brand that never designates one leaves that decision entirely to the system's own judgment, which can land on an outdated directory listing, a third-party summary, or an old press mention just as easily as it lands on the brand's own current site.
Why this matters
If a company has five different descriptions across five places, something has to decide which one is true. A brand that has not made that decision has left it to the system.
Example
A company's own site describes its pricing accurately, but an outdated comparison article states a different figure. If the company has not marked its own pricing page as canonical, a system encountering both has to guess which is correct, and there is no guarantee it guesses right.
Where this sits
Canonical Source belongs to Retrieval, Evidence & Consensus, one of the seven layers of the Aingworth Glossary. Information exists, then it is retrieved, then sources are selected, then they corroborate one another, then consensus emerges. This is where Aingworth's Consensus Over Rankings thesis lives.
Continue with: The Stakes Test: Why Credibility Decides High-Value Deals.
Related terms
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