Caveats — vendor quarantine for the presentation-layer evidence

Quarantined vendor sources (incentive-flagged — directional only):

• HubSpot Website Grader / Marketing Grader / AEO Grader. Incentive: capture emails, convert to software customers. Self-described lead-gen mechanism. Used to ILLUSTRATE the prevailing scorecard pattern, NOT as a communication model.
• Pointerpro maturity-assessment marketing. Vendor that markets maturity assessments as "value-driven lead magnets." Same role.
• Agency "free HubSpot grader" pages (Cronyx Digital, Nextiny, Forecom, ProperExpression). Agency lead-gen reselling the grader pattern.

Honest gaps in the evidence base:

1. Most behavioral evidence comes from health, climate, intelligence, and consumer domains — not SMB marketing self-assessments specifically. Transfer by reasoned inference.
2. "Visual reduces worry where text increases it" rests on limited sourcing (Han et al. focus groups + follow-ups).
3. The precision-backfires-when-wrong finding is essentially single-source (Pena-Marin 2019).
4. "Fear appeals rarely backfire" (Tannenbaum 2015) is contested by minority literature (Peters, Ruiter & Kok); both agree the efficacy pairing is decisive.