Editorial Policy

Every page on this site follows the same rules: every figure is cited to a document, no price is ever written in prose, manufacturer claims are labeled as manufacturer claims, and we never claim to have tested anything. Where a figure is not published, the page says so rather than estimating one.

• Every specification comes from a document, and the document is cited on the page it appears on, with the date it was read. Almost always that is the manufacturer's own product listing or manual.
• Unpublished figures are written 'Not published'. We do not estimate, we do not carry a number across from a similar model, and we do not repeat a figure we saw on another site without going to the source.
• Manufacturer claims are labeled as such. A dust-pickup percentage with no stated test method is reported as a manufacturer-reported figure, not as a specification.
• Relative claims are unpacked. When a brand says '70x more suction' or '30% better carpet cleaning', we say what it is 70x or 30% better *than* - and in both real cases on this site, the answer is the same manufacturer's own older product.
• Owner experience is cited and linked, never paraphrased. We do not have owner data of our own and we will not write forum threads into our own voice as though we did.

• That we tested a product. No 'in our testing', no unit counts, no lab, no owned machines. Every review carries an explicit section listing the claims we could not check.
• A credential nobody here holds. No certifications, no expert panel, no technical qualifications, no 'reviewed by' from a person who does not exist.
• Tenure or authority. No claim of decades in the trade, no self-described expertise, no invented seniority. The byline is an enthusiast and it says so.
• A fabricated review or testimonial. This brand is new and has no customers to quote. There is no testimonials section on this site and there will not be one until there is something real to put in it.
• A price, in prose. Prices render only from the live data layer with a verification date.
• A rating in structured data. Our scores are editorial judgments about published specifications and stay on the page. Emitting them as review-rating markup would assert to a search engine that we tested and rated the product.

Corrections take priority over new content. A site built on published figures can be checked, which means when it is wrong, it is verifiably wrong, and that is worse than being vague.

If you find an error, tell us and cite where the correct figure is published. Naming the source makes it fixable in minutes instead of hours.

• Prices: daily. Read from the retailer and stamped with the verification date. Data older than 48 hours is discarded automatically and the buy controls fall back to 'Check price'.
• Roundups: every 90 days. Picks are re-validated against live availability and against the band's ceiling. A machine that has gone out of stock or risen above its band is replaced, not left in place.
• Guides: every 180 days. This category moves fast enough that a two-year-old explainer is describing a different market.
• Immediately, out of cycle, whenever a pick goes out of stock, breaches its ceiling, or a reader reports a factual error.

Every page shows the date it was last updated in its byline, and the site's sitemap uses those real content dates rather than the build timestamp. The daily price refresh redeploys this site, so a build-stamped sitemap would claim every page changed every day - and any search engine reading it would stop believing the field within a fortnight.

No manufacturer has paid for placement or been offered it, and we have accepted no free products, review units or sponsored content. The ranking is computed from the published rubric before any commercial link is attached, and commission rate is not one of the five scored metrics.

The practical test of that is whether a site is willing to say a popular product is bad. Every roundup on this site names a machine we would not buy, and on the main ranking it is from the best-known brand in the category - a machine we would earn a commission on if you bought it anyway. The full funding detail is on the affiliate disclosure page.

This site covers robot vacuums that are currently in stock and under $300, sold in the United States. Both are checked against live retailer data before a page is written, and several models we had planned to cover were dropped because they failed one of those checks.

We do not cover the tier above the ceiling except as a comparison point, we do not cover non-US markets, and we do not cover other floor-care categories. A page recommending a machine you cannot buy is worse than no page.