SIFT is a four-move information evaluation framework: Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, and Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context. It was first formally described under the SIFT acronym in a June 2019 blog post, evolving from the "four moves and a habit" approach in the 2017 textbook Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, itself grounded in Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew's Stanford research on how professional fact-checkers use "lateral reading."
SIFT was designed as a direct replacement for checklist-based approaches like the CRAAP test, which Caulfield argued were derived from library collection development criteria ill-suited for the open web. Rather than deeply analyzing a single source, SIFT teaches users to quickly leave the source and check what others say about it. As Caulfield told Inside Higher Ed: "try doing these couple of things first, see what you find, then think." The method is deliberately fast — often taking under 30 seconds — and emphasizes building habits rather than applying checklists.
SIFT has become one of the two primary ways information literacy is taught in U.S. universities. It is taught by hundreds of research libraries across North America, has been adopted in the Google Super Searchers curriculum (translated into a dozen languages with 11,000+ educators trained in India alone), was the core methodology of Caulfield and Wineburg's 2023 book Verified.