Provenance is the recorded origin and history of a piece of content or a claim: where it came from, who touched it, and what changed, kept so it can be audited later rather than taken on trust.
Why it matters
When an answer engine or an agent repeats a claim, the useful question is not only whether it is right but where it came from. A claim with no traceable origin cannot be checked.
Provenance is what makes content accountable. It is the difference between the brand approved this and something generated this, and no one can say what changed after.
For anything a brand publishes or an agent acts on, the trail is what lets you replay the decision instead of trusting a black box.
How Jinn treats it
Ghost stamps an explicit origin on everything it creates, from a manual draft to an overnight autonomous run, and the origin a request can forge is walled off from the ones only trusted server code may write.
State changes append to a paper trail of what was approved versus what shipped, and each row is linked by a hash chain. Tampering with one row breaks the chain and gets flagged, so the history is evidence, not decoration.
Related terms
A claim you cannot trace is a claim you cannot trust.
Provenance is what makes content auditable instead of taken on faith. See how the record grounds every claim.