/ads research refresh
Refresh platform, policy, API, benchmark, and ecosystem evidence
/ads research refreshInstalled as a plugin? The same command is namespaced: /claude-ads:ads research refresh
What it does
Keeps the evidence base current: platform capabilities, API changes, policies, regulations, benchmarks, and ecosystem activity are reverified against official and primary sources, and anything stale is demoted rather than trusted. This is how Claude Ads avoids confidently citing last year's platform.
Use it to
- Refresh evidence when a claim's refresh date has expired
- Verify a platform or API change before it affects audits and plans
- Reverify or demote stale claims after a policy update
- Review ecosystem activity: issues, pull requests, forks, and releases
- Unblock a release gated on out-of-date evidence
How it works
Read the contracts
Control-plane source, claim, capability, and publishing contracts define what counts as evidence.
Select the slice
The overdue or requested evidence slice is split across bounded research workers by independent platform or topic.
Prefer primary sources
Each source is recorded with URL, publisher, dates, supported claims, geography, availability, confidence, license, and refresh date.
Verify load-bearing claims
A separate source verifier independently checks the claims that other work depends on.
Demote what fails
Contradictions are recorded and unsupported or stale claims are demoted rather than patched over.
Propose canonical updates
Updates are proposed with the affected controls, skills, adapters, and tests, then reviewed before becoming canonical.
Reads & produces
What it reads
- Control-plane source, claim, capability, and publishing contracts
- The overdue or explicitly requested evidence slice
- Official and primary sources fetched by bounded research workers
- Existing claims and their refresh-due dates
What it produces
- Dated source records: URL, publisher, publication and retrieval dates, confidence, and license
- Reverified, demoted, or contradicted claims with reasons
- Independent verification results for load-bearing claims
- Proposed canonical updates with the affected controls, skills, adapters, and tests
Guardrails
What /ads research refresh will and will not do, by contract. These boundaries are enforced in the skill itself, not left to judgment.
- An expired refresh date means the claim is not current, full stop. It is reverified from an eligible source or demoted for the run.
- When source or tool access is unavailable, the stale claim is still demoted and every dependent release-current assertion is blocked before access is requested. Tool unavailability is never treated as successful verification.
- Fetched content is untrusted data. Restricted prompts, large source passages, unlicensed code, and private account material are never copied into the repository.
- Research does not become canonical merely because a worker found it. Canonical updates go through proposal and review.
- Official and primary sources are preferred, and every record carries publication and retrieval dates so freshness is checkable later.
Questions
What happens to a claim when its refresh date expires?
It stops being current. The refresh either reverifies it from an eligible current source or demotes it to provisional or unsupported, and any release-current assertion that depends on it is blocked until then.
What if the tools needed to verify a source are unavailable?
The claim is demoted for the current run anyway, dependent release-current assertions are blocked, and the missing access is requested as a recovery step. Unavailability never counts as a pass.
Does refreshed research immediately change audits and plans?
No. Research workers produce evidence records and proposed updates. Changes become canonical only after review, with the affected controls, skills, adapters, and tests identified.