Editorial standards

This page sets out what we hold ourselves to. It is written so a reader can check us against it.

What we will not claim

We do not place test orders and we will not say that we do. Our daily check confirms that a retailer is currently publishing an offer through its affiliate network, and the page tells you when that was last confirmed. That is a narrower claim than “verified”, and it is the true one.

We publish no star ratings, because we have no genuine reader reviews to base them on. We do not invent expiry dates. When a feed supplies no end date, the page says so instead of guessing.

Bylines are real people with real beats

Every store page is maintained by the writer who covers that category, and every article carries the name of the person responsible for it. A writer covers one beat rather than the whole site, because someone who follows clothing discounting all year knows things about it that a generalist does not.

We do not use collective bylines to hide who wrote something, and we do not invent a reporter persona to make automated output look hand written.

Where automation ends and a person begins

Offer listings, counts, category rankings and check logs are produced by software reading the tracker. Nobody types those numbers, which is why they stay correct as the data moves.

The written parts of a store page and the articles in our guides and reports are drafted with the help of language models against real data from the tracker, then held to the rules on this page before publication. A draft that states a figure we cannot show, that claims testing we did not do, or that would read the same for any retailer on earth does not get published. We think readers deserve to know that rather than to guess.

Independence from the commercial side

Commission never changes the order of offers on a page. The sort is the same formula for a retailer that pays us and one that does not, and a large share of the stores we track pay us nothing. We do not sell placement, we do not accept payment to write about a retailer, and we do not remove a store because it asked.

Corrections

We correct errors of fact on the page where they appeared. If the error changed what a reader would have done, we say what changed rather than quietly editing the sentence. Write to [email protected] if you find one.

When this page stops being true

If we change how the site works, this page changes with it. A standards page that describes a process the site no longer follows is worse than no page at all.