How do you validate false positives in Google search results for compliance risk?

What helped a bit was separating authority detection from risk scoring. I treat authority hits as a flag (“this entity has regulatory history”) 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 ≠ 20 independent signals).

At scale, I’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.