Measurement, control 17 of 17
M-17 Define denominators and uncertainty before declaring gains
P1Needs your evidence
A rate needs an explicit denominator, a handling rule for missing observations and an uncertainty method appropriate to the sampling design.
- Priority
- High priority.
- Hard gate
- No
- Change class
- READ_ONLY: Inspect authorised evidence.
- Quality bucket
- Not scored
Evidence to review
- Metric dictionary, sample counts, calculations and uncertainty notes.
How to implement
- Report overall recommendation coverage separately from recommendation conditional on a mention.
- Include failures and ambiguous labels in study accounting.
- Use prompt-level or clustered analysis where repeated runs are correlated.
- Predeclare minimum meaningful change and evaluation windows; avoid optional stopping.
How UltimateSEO checks this
Needs your evidence. No automated check covers this control, so it stays UNKNOWN until evidence is supplied.
States used: PASS, FAIL, UNKNOWN, NOT_APPLICABLE or BLOCKED. UNKNOWN is never shown as a pass. How states work.
Part of The UltimateSEO Framework v4.3, catalogue dated 2026-10-14. Evidence states, control states and the publish gate are explained on the hub.