Independence
- No manufacturer, retailer, or agency pays for coverage, placement, or a ranking position on PickPrism.
- No brand reviews an article before publication.
- Affiliate commission rates are not an input to any scoring factor or ranking decision.
- We do not accept free products, because accepting them would create an obligation we would then have to disclose on every page.
Evidence standards
- Every specification traces to a published document, recorded with a retrieval date.
- Unpublished specifications are shown as Not published. We never estimate a number and present it as fact.
- Calculated metrics state their inputs and use the same formula for every product in a comparison.
- A product without enough verified information to justify recommending it is left out entirely.
- We distinguish between facts that stay true (dimensions, model numbers) and facts that go stale quickly (availability, configuration, current lineup), and we re-check the second kind more often.
Claims we will not make
- That we tested, used, handled, measured, or lived with a product.
- That we surveyed owners or interviewed users.
- Medical, health, safety, legal, or financial advice of any kind.
- Guarantees about durability, reliability, or performance in a specific home.
- That a product is "the best" without stating who it is best for and under what weighting.
What we will not publish
- Content about categories with disproportionate safety, legal, or compliance risk — including weapons, tobacco and nicotine, gambling, prescription medicines, restricted chemicals, and anything whose promotion is prohibited by law or by the platforms we rely on.
- Pages created only to occupy a keyword, with no decision value behind them.
- Near-duplicate guides. If a new topic can be answered by improving an existing page, we improve the existing page.
- Rewrites or close paraphrases of other publishers' work, and reproductions of tests we did not run.
- Manufactured urgency: countdown timers, fake scarcity, invented sale labels.
Rankings and awards
Awards are specific and earned. "Best for small spaces" means the weighting favoured footprint and weight, and this product won under that weighting. We do not hand out a generic Editor's Choice, and we do not invent a differentiator so that every product on the page can have a badge. If two products are genuinely equivalent for a use case, the article says so.
Every recommendation states who should skip it. A guide that finds nothing wrong with anything is not a guide.
Affiliate links
- Articles containing paid links carry a disclosure above the content and beside the recommendations.
- Outbound affiliate links are marked as sponsored in the page markup and open directly to the retailer — never through a PickPrism redirect.
- Links are placed where they help a decision, not in every paragraph.
- An article publishes with no affiliate links at all rather than with a link we cannot verify.
Updates and removal
Guides are reviewed on a schedule and whenever something material changes. On review we re-verify specifications, remove discontinued products, repair links, and revise conclusions where the evidence has moved. Dates are never changed to fake freshness.
Pages that no longer earn their place get improved, merged into a stronger guide, or removed. When a URL goes away, it redirects to the closest useful page.
Automation
PickPrism uses software to help research, draft, and maintain articles. That does not change what we are accountable for: everything published here is subject to the same evidence and compliance standards regardless of how it was drafted, and anything that fails those checks does not publish. Automation is why the site can keep its sources verified — it is not a licence to publish more, faster.
Corrections
Errors get fixed promptly and visibly. See corrections.