Editorial policy
Our rules for independent reviews: no paid reviews, no brand approval before publication, disclosed loaners, conflicts of interest, corrections and AI use.
Our reviews are only useful if you can trust them. These are the rules we follow to keep them that way.
No paid reviews, ever
We don’t accept money, gifts or favours in exchange for a review, a score, a ranking or a place in a buying guide. Brands can’t pay for a faster review or a better verdict, and they can’t pay to be left out of a comparison.
Brands don’t see reviews before publication
Brands never see, approve or edit a review before it is published. We may contact a brand to check facts such as specifications, warranty terms or prices. We don’t share our verdict, our score or our text.
We may agree to publish on a brand’s launch date. We don’t agree to any conditions on what we say.
Loaners and samples
We buy most products at retail price. When a brand lends a unit, we say so at the top of the review, and we return it when testing is done.
If a brand gives us a product to keep, the review says so as well. Keeping a product doesn’t earn it a better verdict.
Every review states how we got the unit we tested: bought, lent or given.
Conflicts of interest
If the publisher of The Consumer Review has any commercial relationship with a brand, we disclose it on every review in that brand’s category, not just on reviews of that brand’s products.
If a reviewer has a personal connection to a brand, such as a close family member who works there, someone else reviews that product.
We earn affiliate commissions from retailers. Commissions don’t decide what we review, how we score it or where it ranks. Our affiliate disclosure explains how this works.
Corrections
We make mistakes, and we want to fix them quickly.
If you spot an error, email editors@theconsumerreview.com with a link to the page and what you think is wrong. A source helps if you have one.
We check every report. If we got something wrong, we fix it and add a dated note to the page saying what changed. We fix small typos without a note. Anything that changes a fact, a price, a score or a verdict gets one.
How we use AI tools
- AI tools may help us draft text, tidy up language and translate pages, for example from English into Hindi.
- Every verdict, score, pro and con comes from hands-on testing by a person, never from an AI tool.
- An editor checks every page before it is published, including anything an AI tool helped write.
- The editor, not the tool, is responsible for what we publish.
Questions about this policy
Email editors@theconsumerreview.com. We are happy to explain how we work.