What is the difference between a confirmed attribution and a lead?
A lead is a claim that a company might be involved in a project, and a confirmed attribution is a claim that independent sources agree on, carrying a date and a stated confidence level so you know how hard to lean on it.
Why the distinction is not pedantic
Both look identical in a spreadsheet: a company name next to a project name. The difference only shows up on the phone. A confirmed attribution lets you open with something specific and be taken seriously. A lead makes you ask a question the other person expects you to already know the answer to, and in a market where reputation travels, that costs more than the call.
What "confirmed" has to mean
It means separate sources, gathered independently of each other, agree. It does not mean a claim appeared in several places, because places copy each other constantly, and the same original repeated four times is still one source. It also does not mean a machine assigned it a high score. A score is a summary of evidence, not a substitute for having any.
The honest middle
Plenty of real information sits between confirmed and useless. A single credible report of a project. A company that is clearly busy without a project attached yet. A site that is obviously active with no roster confirmed. Deleting all of it would throw away genuine value, and promoting it to certainty would poison the data.
The workable answer is to publish it with a plain label saying what it is. Confirmed across several independent sources. Supported by more than one. Reported once, still being watched. A person reading that can decide for themselves how hard to push, which is the whole point.
What we do
Every row Construction Recon publishes carries its confidence level in plain words and the date it was last confirmed, and anything we cannot attribute is published as an unattributed project rather than given a name it has not earned. Ask us to back a row and we will. See how we confirm.
Last reviewed September 3, 2026 by Construction Recon.