Our sources and citation standard

This page sets out where our facts come from and how they are cited. Sources are ranked in four tiers, company claims stay attributed to the company, and every material claim carries an evidence label. When a source turns out to be wrong, we correct the page and date the change.

Our source hierarchy

Every claim on this site traces to a source, and not all sources carry the same weight. Sources fall into four tiers here, and each tier is used only for what it can actually support.

Primary beats secondary whenever both exist. If a well-known article and the vendor's own pricing page disagree about a number, we publish the number on the pricing page and date it. Our method is verification-based: documents we can open, pricing pages we can check on the day we publish, and independent user reports we can count. We do not run hands-on tests, and nothing here is written as though we did.

How we attribute claims

A company statement stays attached to the company. When a vendor says its product is accurate, fast, secure, or unlimited, we write that the company says it. We do not drop the attribution and let a marketing claim read as an independent finding, and we do not launder a vendor number by repeating it in a summary or a comparison table without its origin.

When a vendor claim has no independent confirmation, we say that too. Naming the claim, naming its source, and stating that we found no confirmation is more useful to a reader than either repeating the claim or leaving it out.

Contested claims are labeled contested. Where credible sources disagree, we publish the disagreement instead of picking the version that reads better, and we say what would settle it.

User reviews are read as experience patterns, not as verdicts. A single complaint is an anecdote. The same complaint recurring across independent sources over time is a pattern worth reporting, and we report it as one. A pattern in user reports never becomes a verified fact on its own; it becomes a documented pattern the reader can weigh against the vendor's own documentation.

How evidence appears on the page

Every material claim carries an evidence class. There are five, and only five: Verified, User-reported, Vendor-reported, Estimated, and Unknown. Our methodology sets out what each label means and how it limits a score.

The class is carried in the wording of the claim itself, alongside the dated pricing-verification stamp reviews display. A verified claim names the document and the date it was checked. A user-reported claim says that multiple users report it. A vendor-reported claim says the company states it. The wording tells you how much weight the sentence can hold.

Unknown is a real option and we use it. When a refund rule, a retention window, or a usage limit is not documented anywhere we can check, we publish that it is undisclosed rather than filling the gap with an assumption. Estimated means our own arithmetic from published numbers, and we state the assumptions so a reader can redo the math.

Pricing gets the strictest handling because it moves the fastest. We check plans, credit limits, and entry prices against the vendor's live pricing page on the day we publish, and the page carries the date of that check. Plans change after we publish, so a price that has drifted since its last check is a correction waiting to be reported.

External links

Linking the primary document is the standard our new and updated reviews are held to: when a claim rests on a pricing page, a policy, a changelog, or a filing, a reader should be able to open the same page we did without going looking for it.

Promotional sources are used for discovery, not for verification. An affiliate blog, an aggregator, or a marketing roundup can point us toward a tool, a price change, or a complaint, and that is the whole of their role. When a promotional or competitor-published page is the only origin of a figure, we name that origin and mark the figure as unconfirmed rather than presenting it as established.

An affiliate link is a commercial link, and we disclose it as one wherever it appears. The outbound vendor links on our reviews are usually commercial links; the pricing claims themselves are verified against the vendor's own live pricing page and dated, and that verification, not the link, is the source.

A broken link is a source problem, so we treat it as one. A dead or redirected source link is a correction, and we fix it within 72 hours of being told.