Methodology & sourcing rules

Principles

Eurotrack separates three kinds of content: events (Developments), measurements (Comparison, EU & partners, energy) and assessments (Situation). An assessment is not a fact; it points to findings and their sources.
Every item rests on a publicly accessible source with a link. The linked source is authoritative, not the summary here.
Research and texts are produced by autonomous AI routines: daily for Developments and Situation, monthly by a script without AI for the measurements. Errors are possible; every correction is welcome.

Only events with a real, working source URL (news site or press release) are recorded; every new URL is checked automatically before inclusion.
The date is the day of first public announcement; figures are recorded as numbers or left empty, never estimated.
Two-source rule: entries with more than 1,000 affected employees or more than €1bn in volume require a second independent source, otherwise the figure is explicitly flagged as reported by a single source.
Rumours and exclusive media reports are marked as reported ("according to …").
The same announcement from multiple sources yields one entry; follow-up developments only become a new entry if something substantial has changed.
Pending cases (takeover offers, announced closures, deadlines) are tracked on the watchlist until they are decided.

Each category is assessed against a fixed catalogue of guiding questions and pre-committed tipping thresholds. Every run researches afresh; every finding needs a source with a link, counter-indicators are mandatory, and every threshold is checked explicitly (not triggered · partial · triggered).
Colour and direction per category rate the change since the last run, not the absolute situation: a grave but unchanged situation reads as “stable”. The sentence under the title states the reason; the bar row shows the direction of recent runs (oldest on the left, faded bars = runs carried over unchanged).
In the navigation of the Situation page, “Δ” marks a category with a substantive change since the last run; the dot next to it shows the most severe status among its thresholds.
“Partial coverage” marks a run that did not reach all guiding questions or primary sources: “no change” then only means “nothing evidenced”. “Lapsed” marks a threshold whose event is more than 30 days old and no longer has continuing effect.
Web search is a sample, not a full picture. Open the primary sources yourself for decisions that matter. An unchanged situation is a valid result.

Each core claim carries an evidence level:

Substantiated: independently corroborated: several independently reporting sources; syndication of one wire item does not count twice
Plausible: a single source, or a party's own account. Claims by a party to a conflict about its adversary are capped here
Disputed: solid sources contradict each other
Unsubstantiated: claim without independent support
Refuted: contradicted by evidence

The EU27, the US and China are only compared using the same source and the same definition. The EU value comes from the source itself; where it has none, it is the population-weighted mean or the sum of the 27 member states; each indicator page names the method.
The spread of the member states is shown next to the EU value, because an average hides large differences.
Every value carries its reference year and retrieval date. Where the latest years differ, this is stated; missing country values are carried forward for a few years at most and named on the page.
There is no overall score and no ranking. Each indicator states its caveats (estimates, method changes, comparability).
The data (World Bank, Our World in Data, Ember, SIPRI and others) is fetched monthly by a script without AI.

Population, economic output, the convergence criteria values and the list of trade agreements notified to the WTO are fetched automatically every month from the World Bank, Eurostat and the WTO.
The negotiation status of the candidate countries and of EU trade agreements is researched, primarily from the Commission, the Council, the Official Journal and the Court of Justice. Every entry names its sources and the date it was last checked; reached milestones are checked promptly, all other entries at least every four weeks.
The reference values of the convergence criteria are approximations. The convergence reports of the ECB and the Commission are authoritative.

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