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BuySignal

Editorial policy

Last updated: [DATE]

The promise

Every verdict on BuySignal is an editorial judgement, made independently of any commercial relationship. No company can buy coverage, buy a score, buy a ranking position, or buy the removal of criticism. This page documents exactly how we work, so that you can check whether we live up to it — and hold us to it when we do not.

How products are selected

We decide what to cover before we look at what it pays. In practice a product enters the queue because:

  • readers ask about it — search demand, direct questions, or repeated mentions in a category;
  • it is prominent in one of the marketplaces we follow (ClickBank, Digistore24, JVZoo, WarriorPlus, Impact, Amazon), so a buyer is likely to encounter it;
  • it is a credible alternative to something we already cover, and a comparison would be useful;
  • it is being marketed aggressively, which is often the moment an independent assessment is most needed.

Nothing enters the queue because a merchant asked, paid, or offered a higher commission. Products with no affiliate programme at all — including free and open-source tools — are covered whenever they are the right answer.

The assessment framework

Every product is documented against the same dimensions, in the same order, so that reviews are comparable rather than a series of unrelated essays:

  1. What it is. The product, its format and delivery, and the claims its own marketing makes — reported separately from our view of those claims.
  2. Pricing. Entry price, billing model, upsells and higher tiers, what is excluded, and the refund terms as published by the merchant when we last verified them.
  3. Audience fit. Who it genuinely serves, at what experience level, and who should not buy it.
  4. Strengths. What it does well, described concretely enough that a reader can verify it.
  5. Limitations. Gaps, trade-offs, friction, and anything the sales page leaves out.
  6. Alternatives. Competing products, free options, and the case for buying nothing at all.

A review is not published until every dimension has an honest answer. "We could not determine this" is an acceptable and frequently used answer — inventing one is not.

What the editor score means

Where a page shows an editor score, it is a human editor's summary judgement of that product against the framework above, as at the date of the last update shown on the page. It is not an average of user ratings, not a computed formula, and not a proxy for commission rate.

A score appears only when an editor actually assigned one. If a product page shows no score, none has been assigned — because coverage is early, because information was too thin to justify a number, or because a score would imply more certainty than we have. We never display an automatically generated rating and we never fill a gap with a default value.

Scores can move. When a product changes materially — a price rise, a removed feature, a decline in support quality — the score is revisited during re-verification and the page records the change.

Evidence and testing claims

We never claim hands-on testing that did not happen. This is the line we treat as non-negotiable.

  • If a page says we used, bought or tested a product, we did, and the page will indicate the period and the plan or tier involved.
  • If our assessment is based on documentation, demonstrations, trials, published specifications, merchant support responses and user reports rather than sustained hands-on use, the page says that instead.
  • Screenshots are our own, or are clearly credited to the merchant or another source.
  • We do not present a vendor demo as our own experience, and we do not describe results we have not observed.

Where a product's outcome depends heavily on the buyer's own effort — as most digital products do — we say so rather than implying a guaranteed result.

Sourcing and citations

  • Factual claims about price, features, terms and availability are sourced to the merchant's own official pages wherever possible, and dated.
  • Third-party claims are attributed to their source and linked, so you can check them yourself.
  • User feedback is treated as signal, not proof: we look for consistent patterns across independent sources rather than quoting a single review, and we discount volume that looks incentivised.
  • We do not cite other affiliate review sites as evidence. They are usually citing the same sales page we are.
  • Where a merchant's claim cannot be independently verified, we label it as a claim rather than repeating it as fact.

Use of artificial intelligence

We think readers deserve a direct answer on this, so here it is:

  • Our articles, reviews and buying guides are written by people. A human researches the product, forms the judgement and writes the words.
  • AI is not used to generate reviews, verdicts, scores, pros-and-cons lists or comparison tables.
  • Images are produced or selected by people — original screenshots, licensed assets or merchant-supplied media, credited where required. We do not pass off synthetic imagery as a photograph of a real product.
  • We do not publish AI-generated content submitted by third parties, and unsolicited AI-written guest posts are declined.

Where software assists with mechanical, non-editorial tasks — spell-checking, formatting, or flagging a page whose price data looks stale — a human still makes every editorial decision and every published sentence is a human's responsibility.

Independence and the commercial firewall

BuySignal is funded by affiliate commissions, described in full in our affiliate disclosure. To keep that funding from touching editorial conclusions:

  • Coverage decisions come first, affiliate-programme checks second.
  • Commission rates are not part of the review workflow. They are not shown alongside a product while a verdict is being written, and they play no role in ordering a comparison or a buying guide.
  • No individual is compensated on the performance of a specific review.
  • Merchants never get pre-publication approval. We will check a factual point with a merchant before publishing, but we do not send drafts for sign-off and we do not accept edits to opinion.
  • Negative reviews stay published. Ending an affiliate relationship does not remove a review, soften a verdict or change a score.
  • Rankings are not for sale. There are no paid positions, paid featuring or paid link insertions — see the contact page for what we decline.

If a merchant ever conditions a partnership on editorial outcome, we decline the partnership and note that the relationship was refused where it is relevant to a page.

Corrections policy

We would rather be corrected than be wrong.

How to report an error. Email us through the contact page with the page URL, the exact text that is wrong, what it should say, and a source if you have one. Reports from product makers are welcome and are assessed on the evidence, exactly like any other.

What happens next.

  1. We acknowledge the report, normally within [1–2] business days.
  2. We verify the claim against primary sources.
  3. If it is right, we fix it promptly. If it is not, we explain why we are leaving the page as it stands.

How corrections are marked.

  • Typographical and formatting fixes are made silently.
  • Factual corrections — a wrong price, feature, date or name — are made and the page's updated date changes.
  • Material corrections that change the sense of a passage, or that would change a reader's decision, carry a dated correction note on the page itself explaining what was wrong and what it now says.
  • Changes to a verdict or a score are noted explicitly, with the reason.

We do not quietly delete a page to make an error disappear. If something must be withdrawn entirely, the page explains that it was withdrawn and why.

Updates and re-verification

Product facts decay quickly, so every page carries its own dates:

  • Published — when the page first went live.
  • Updated — when its content last changed materially.
  • Last verified — when its key facts were last checked against official sources.

Our target cadence is a verification pass on active product pages every [90] days, and sooner when a price change, a relaunch, a significant feature change or a wave of reader reports reaches us. Pages we can no longer verify — because the product has been discontinued or the merchant has vanished — are marked as such rather than left to look current.

Conflicts of interest

  • Contributors disclose any financial interest, employment, consulting relationship or personal connection to a company being covered, and are reassigned if the conflict is material.
  • We do not accept payment, gifts or perks in exchange for coverage. Review units or complimentary access provided for evaluation are disclosed on the page and do not create an obligation to publish anything, still less anything positive.
  • We do not hold undisclosed equity in the companies whose products we assess.
  • Contributor biographies and prior affiliations are shown on their author pages so you can weigh them yourself.

Reader feedback

This policy is a commitment, and it only means something if readers can test it. If you think a page falls short of it — a claim that looks unsupported, a verdict that seems to track the commission, a fact that has gone stale — tell us through the contact page. We will look, and we will tell you what we found.

You can also read about BuySignal, our affiliate disclosure, our privacy policy and our terms of use.