diff --git a/WORK-QUEUE.md b/WORK-QUEUE.md
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+++ b/WORK-QUEUE.md
@@ -1110,3 +1110,37 @@ grades by the archive's tiers (Documented / Corroborated / Testimony only / Unre
 - **Visibility, fourteenth consecutive identical reading:** `private: false`, `internal: false`, default `main`, `updated_at 2026-10-04T12:10:29Z`; anonymous raw reads with no credential — `career-lane/ats-gate-census.md` **200 / 35,252 bytes, sha256 `cea216431f6d6b78…`**, `diff -q` byte-identical to disk; `recoveries/summary-fidelity-full-clauses.md` 200 / 181,040, sha256 `3b4d2951c9ae4589…`, byte-identical; `inbox/seed-2026-09-26.json` 200 / 9,484, sha `e4429147…85e0`, unchanged since 2026-09-26. Q14 still governs; nothing pending is quoted.
 - **Q7, measured:** depth after this tick — Q5, Q6, Q10, Q11, Q12 open and unclaimed, Q9 blocked on the audio handover, Q13 gated on Alexander, Q8 active with 36 entries left, Q17 active with row 1 in and both appends landed. Not thin; **Q18 was opened anyway** because the G2i miss is a repeatable process defect rather than a one-off.
 
+---
+
+## Q18 — Employer-side lead intake must be deduped against the prepared index *(career lane; opened 2026-10-04 by reply 28, per the G2i miss)*
+
+On 2026-10-04 Zephyrus's scouting tick presented **G2i "Senior AI Interaction Evaluator (Codex / Claude Code)"**
+as a new lead. It is not new. `DEDUPE-INDEX.json` holds **one** matching row —
+`ashby:6ea6a53a-7689-45f2-b429-1146965d3cd7`, company `g2i`, *"Staff Software Engineer, AI Code Review - Python,
+Go, Rust, C#"* — with a **finished, unsubmitted package** from **2026-09-25** at
+`daily/2026-09-25/batch-3/g2i-staff-swe-ai-code-review-6ea6a53a/`, and the requisition's own description body is the
+exact "Senior AI Interaction Evaluator" block both he and Built In quote. The live Ashby URL still answers (200,
+2026-10-04).
+
+The defect is on **my** side, and it is the reason this item exists: my reply-24 dedupe was **term-keyed** —
+Handshake, Mercor, Mindrift, northley, Upwork, "ai tutor", "coding agent", "rlhf" — and never probed the company
+name that mattered. A check whose search terms are chosen after the answer is not a check. Left alone, this
+recurs: a rediscovered lead gets scouted, drafted and possibly applied to a second time against a requisition
+already prepared, which is precisely the duplication the index was built to prevent.
+
+**Done means:** a fixed, published **intake rule** for every employer-side lead — before a lead is called
+"net-new", it is tested against `DEDUPE-INDEX.json` on a term set fixed **in advance** and recorded with the check:
+(a) employer/company name and its variants, (b) ATS host and board slug (`jobs.ashbyhq.com/<slug>`,
+`boards.greenhouse.io/<slug>`, `jobs.lever.co/<slug>`), (c) requisition id where one exists, (d) **both** the ATS
+title and the posting's marketing title, since the same req carries different titles in each (this is the exact
+way G2i slipped). The rule is stated once at the top of the employer-side scouting lane and applied without
+exceptions, and the result is reported as **counts and matched keys only** — no row data leaves this host.
+**Evidence:** the fixed term list, the invocation, and the raw match count per term; a `0` is reported as a `0`
+with the terms named, and a match is reported with its key and prepared/submitted status.
+
+**Note for the scouting lane (2026-10-04):** the one matched requisition is **prepared, never submitted**. It needs
+**Alexander's exact-package decision**, not a re-cut — do not draft a second package against it.
+
+**Status, 2026-10-04 — opened; the rule is stated above and the G2i reconciliation is recorded in reply 28 §2.
+Not yet applied to a fresh scouting tick.**
+