The Resolution Layer · Case Study in BriefEKOM
Heating, cooling & water-heating equipment.
A cold read of the public product pages of an equipment manufacturer that sells through distributors and contractors — where the model number is the most reliable field on the page, and a buyer chooses by fuel, capacity and dimensions rather than looks. One of a set of anonymized EKOM analyses — what surfaced, and where it leads.
Lead finding · fuel type that contradicts the model
Propane water heaters whose fuel field says natural gas.
On a line of commercial gas water heaters, the propane models carry the propane designation in the model number and the page address. Of the propane models re-read live, not one lists propane alone: six say natural gas, and thirty-nine list both gases. Every natural-gas model lists natural gas only. A contractor filtering for propane misses them; one filtering for natural gas finds them. Fuel type decides the valve, the orifice and the supply line, so this is an error found at start-up, not at the order.
Also surfaced
A heading that names another model
On 213 pages across seven model families, the page heading carries a neighbouring family's name while the title and SKU name the model itself. Anything that takes the heading as the product name records the wrong model. Seven separate findings turned out to be this one template behaviour.
Specifications that cannot be right
A commercial packaged unit five inches tall. A 65-gallon heat pump water heater with its smaller sibling's 50-gallon tank. Tonnage and capacity from the next size down, and a coil carrying a system's efficiency rating.
Placeholders printed as values
A stand-in number in a tankless heater's hot-water delivery fields, "NULL" as an install location, an editor's "(Duplicate)" note in a model name. Every one passes a completeness check.
What a machine is told
The page shows a five-step category path; the machine-readable breadcrumb is two steps ending in "product". The sitemap lists dead products and doubled entries. Product identity is structured on every page — which is why those fields have to be exact.
How EKOM read it. The engine read every product page in the manufacturer's own sitemap cold — no file, no credentials, no schema — taking each value from its named specification label rather than from the page copy, so a cross-sell panel's figures were never attributed to the wrong model. It held every field against the model number and against the sibling that gets it right, then re-read the headline findings live. Four that no longer showed were held back rather than reported.
From diagnosis to channel-ready. Most of the 44 findings collapse into five upstream mechanisms — model pages carrying the family's text, a fuel value set for the line rather than the unit, values taken from the neighbouring size, database defaults exported as content, and a publishing layer generated apart from the product set. Fixing the findings fixes the findings; fixing the mechanisms fixes every model already filed through them and every one to come. Then the same intelligence holds the line at the source, so the next model filed under the wrong fuel never reaches a distributor's catalog.