How do you detect compliance risk in Google search results?

Question

I&rsquo;m experimenting with a rules-based approach to classify Google SERP snippets (neutral / adverse / authority-regulatory) for compliance and due diligence use cases.One issue I keep running into is false positives from high-authority sources: a single regulator PDF or an old enforcement action can outweigh dozens of neutral results, even when the context has materially changed.For those working in OSINT, risk, or search analysis: how do you usually validate false positives vs. true adverse signals at scale? Do you weight authority differently, or apply temporal or contextual decay?

paolocermelli · Accepted Answer

I&rsquo;ve run into the same issue in practice: a single high-authority PDF (regulator, court, enforcement notice) can dominate the SERP signal even when it&rsquo;s years old and no longer representative of the current risk.What helped a bit was separating authority detection from risk scoring. I treat authority hits as a flag (&ldquo;this entity has regulatory history&rdquo;) rather than letting them linearly outweigh everything else.Then I layer:temporal decay (old authority actions lose weight but never fully disappear),contextual confirmation (are there follow-up articles, remediation, license reinstatements, or ongoing disputes?),and SERP clustering (one PDF echoed 20 times &ne; 20 independent signals).At scale, I&rsquo;ve found that counting distinct adverse narratives matters more than raw authority presence. Authority is a binary condition; persistence and multiplicity are what indicate current compliance risk.