Editorial policy

Last updated April 29, 2026

1. Review chain

Every article on this site is reviewed in three stages: author draft, cross-category gating editor, and Editor-in-Chief sign-off. The gating editor is determined by what the article touches, not by who wrote it. A productivity-app article that mentions sleep claims goes through Yolanda; a smartwatch article that mentions nutrition pairing goes through Camille; an AI-tool article that touches a coding workflow goes through Ravi. Theodora signs off last, and articles do not publish without her signature.

2. Fact-checking

Every factual claim in an article — a price, a feature, a measurement, a citation — must be verifiable from a primary source the reader can also access. We use vendor pages for current prices, App Store listings for feature lists, and primary research papers for any health, sensor, or accuracy claim. If the only source for a claim is a press release, we do not publish the claim.

We re-check vendor-controlled facts (price, feature, plan structure) on every published-article review pass, which is at minimum every 6 months. The check is logged in the public update log, with the reviewing editor's initials.

3. Corrections

We make mistakes. Three so far. When a reader emails correction@whatsthebest.report with a claim that an article got something wrong, the email is acknowledged within 48 hours. The fix, if there is one, is published within a further 5 business days. The article is updated, the modifiedDate is bumped, and a corrections note is added to the bottom of the article describing what changed and why. The fix is also written to the update log.

If a correction would change the verdict, we revisit Step 1 of our methodology. Two articles since launch have had the verdict changed in this way; both noted the change in a "what changed" footer.

4. Conflicts of interest

Every editor's author page contains a stated conflict-of-interest section. Disclosures cover: prior employment at any company named on this site, any equity holdings in such companies, any free trial accounts received from such companies, and any consulting or advisory relationships. The disclosures are written by the editor and reviewed by Theodora.

If an editor cannot write an article without a relevant conflict, the article is reassigned. If the conflict only emerges mid-draft, the article is reassigned and the prior draft is destroyed.

5. The relationship between editorial and commercial

What's The Best Report has no commercial side. The publication is self-funded by Theodora and runs on a budget approximately the size of a hobbyist's yearly newsletter. We have no advertising. We have no affiliate links. We have no sponsored content. We have no premium tier. Everything published on the site is free to read and free of commercial influence on the verdict. This is a deliberate constraint: every commercial mechanism we have studied either creates a verdict-distorting incentive or is impossible to disclose well enough to neutralize that incentive. We do not currently see how to take commercial revenue without compromising the editorial product, so we do not take it.

If we ever introduce commercial mechanisms, every article will be re-read in the light of the new mechanism, the change will be announced on the home page for at least 90 days, and any verdict whose pick is potentially conflicted by the new mechanism will be re-checked by Theodora.

6. AI usage in our process

We use AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT) for first drafts, copy editing, fact-checking against primary sources, and metadata generation. We do not use AI to generate verdicts. The verdict in the yellow callout is always written by the editor on the byline. AI does not have a byline on this site, and we do not publish anonymous, AI-only content. If AI tooling produced material in the article, the editor on the byline took responsibility for it by re-reading and signing off — which is also our standard for everything else, AI-assisted or not.

7. Anonymous and reader-submitted content

We do not publish anonymous content. Every article on the site is signed by a named editor with stated credentials. We accept reader tips at editor@whatsthebest.report; tips that turn into articles are credited in a "tips" section of the relevant article unless the tipster requests anonymity. We do not pay for tips.

8. Pull-down and removal

Articles do not get quietly pulled down. If we kill an article entirely (because of a fundamental error, a discontinued category, or an editorial reversal), the URL is preserved with a note explaining what happened and a link to the closest current verdict. We do not 404 articles to clean up search rankings; that is a category of behavior we built this publication to oppose.

9. Reader feedback

We read every email. Reader feedback that surfaces a factual error becomes a correction (see Section 3). Reader feedback that argues against a verdict becomes a re-check on the next scheduled review pass; if the argument is strong enough, we revisit the methodology earlier than scheduled.