The gates Annotated, Recruited, and Grounded of the DSCRI-ARGDW pipeline, where the primary audience is the annotation/selection/retrieval system and the gating condition is verifiable relevance.

Jason Barnard defines the Algorithm Phase as the segment of the DSCRI-ARGDW pipeline where content is processed, tagged, and evaluated for trustworthiness. At Annotated, content is tagged across 24+ dimensions including entity associations, topical authority, and temporal relevance. At Recruited, competing annotations are weighed and the algorithm selects which content to carry forward, where dimensions multiply rather than average. At Grounded, LLMs verify retrieved content against their parametric knowledge before including it in responses. This is where GEO operates - and where most GEO practitioners make the mistake of optimizing only at this stage without addressing the Bot Phase foundation. The Algorithm Phase maps to UCD's Credibility (C) dimension and Phase 2 (Lock-In) of the three-phase rollout.

DSCRI-ARGDW gates Annotated → Recruited → Grounded. Primary audience: algorithms. Gate: verifiable relevance. Maps to UCD Credibility (C) and Phase 2 (Lock-In) of the three-phase rollout.