The checks

Citation coverage

Every sentence carrying a number, a date or an attribution must trace to a source we retrieved, with the retrieval time. Uncited claims are deleted, not softened.

Language

No guarantee, no “risk-free”, no medical or investment claim, and no first-person testing unless a capture records it. This one rejects outright — it does not ask for a rewrite.

Required evidence

The brief names the evidence a page needs before it is written. Anything buying-related must additionally carry at least one screenshot we took ourselves.

Uniqueness

Measured against everything else we have published. A page too close to one of ours is sent back for a different angle, not published as a variation.

Image provenance

Own captures, generated originals or cleared CC0 only, each with its origin recorded. No third-party photography, ever.

Disclosure

The affiliate disclosure is inserted above the fold by the system, from one template, so it cannot be worded away or dropped on an individual page.

Merchant terms

Link counts and forbidden contexts are enforced per programme, and a bare merchant URL is rejected — every outbound link resolves through our own tracked redirect.

Price freshness

Every figure resolves to a product checked inside its window. Outside it, the figure is suppressed and replaced with a link to check the live price.

What happens when a check fails

A failure is either a rejection or a revision. Rejections stop the page permanently — prohibited language and breached merchant terms are both rejections. Revisions send the draft back against the specific check that failed, and only that check; the rest of the page is not rewritten.

A draft gets two revisions. If it still cannot pass, it does not publish. Nothing is released on the grounds that it was nearly there.

Why a price sometimes goes missing

If you see a link to check the current price where you expected a figure, the check behind that figure aged out of its window. We would rather show you nothing than show you a number that was true last week.

The same rule removes a product from a comparison when it goes out of stock. A comparison that drops below the number of options it needs is held back rather than published thin.

Where a person still decides

No check can decide whether a page is worth your time. That is why sensitive subjects go to a review queue instead of straight out, why approving from that queue re-runs the full battery rather than bypassing it, and why any page can be withdrawn at any moment.