GenAI, undoubtedly, can polish an academic question, yet its formulation doesn’t automatically prove the researcher's ability to defend the gap thoroughly. A conceptual article on gap-based research-question formulation has a critical foundation, treating the operation as a sequence of evidence judgments: reading the literature, choosing and defending a gap, distilling a research problem and defending the question. Gap justification, under Gen AI intervention, should relate to structured inquiry, process-sensitive appraisal literature, and a specific framework that guides the formulation of a reliably relevant and feasible research question. The proposed framework of research questions connects these operations to evidence of quality, theoretical grounds presented as the basis of research questions, and GenAI intervention. The claim is not only that the process should be assessed against the product (question formulation vs. question defensibility), but it is also what to inspect, at the level of the researcher’s competence evidence, from literature review to a defensible question. The framework is therefore conceptual and still requires evidence, but the framework provides a basis for an assessment in which the question is not the only evidence of research competence.