Vendor APIs change. Documentation moves. A technical claim that was correct six months ago may not be correct today. Any site that documents other vendors’ platforms, as ours does, has to decide what to do about that.
Traceable, not just cited
Every platform page on this site cites the primary vendor documentation it was written from. Our goal is to make integration research traceable back to primary vendor documentation, so it can be checked again when the vendor changes. A citation you cannot re-check is decoration; a citation you can re-check is evidence.
Re-checking in practice
We built a checker that re-fetches every cited page, normalises the text, and compares it with a stored snapshot, reporting what broke, what changed and what moved. We currently run it by hand, and we are working towards running it on a schedule. That is the honest state: a tool that exists, and an automation that is still being put in place.
What the first full re-check found
The run covered every URL cited across our platform pages. Fourteen were reported broken. Reading them showed a pattern: nearly all were documentation portals refusing to talk to a script at all, while the pages themselves still existed. Calling those broken was wrong, and worse, it buried the one genuine break.
That one was Globality. Their webhooks documentation had been a PDF; they moved their site and the PDF disappeared. The reachable version of the document is an older revision that lists fewer webhook events than the one we had cited, so we updated our citations and restated the events to what the reachable documentation actually says.
The fix to the checker was a new category: blocked, for pages that refuse automated requests, kept separate from broken, for pages that are actually gone. The distinction sounds small. It is the difference between a report a person will read and one they will learn to ignore.
Changed pages are the interesting ones
Most changed pages had moved by a few per cent: navigation, footers, cookie banners. Two moved enough to matter. SAP’s article on authentication for SuccessFactors now gives a firm date for removing its oldest sign-in method, where our page had said “being retired”; the page now gives the date. Workday’s web-services reference moved to a new version; the citation now says which.
Neither change altered what composer does. Both altered what a reader would find if they followed the link, and the page should match what they find.
Why bother
Because the alternative is discovering the rot in a sales call. A technical evaluator will click the citation. If it is dead, or says something different from our page, every other claim on the site loses credibility with it. Research about other vendors’ APIs is only defensible if it can be re-checked, and re-checking is only sustainable if the noise is taken out of the report.
Written with Claude. This post was drafted with Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, working from the composerID repository: the registry, the schemas, the reference sandbox and the vendor documentation it cites. Edited and published by the composerID team.