Review methodology

The source hierarchy

Every published figure is assigned to one of four tiers, and the tier travels with the number wherever it appears.

1. Vendor documentation. A help centre article, terms page, published rate card or in-account screen owned by the network itself. Highest confidence, cited with the date it was read.
2. Vendor marketing. Landing pages and feature lists. Accepted as a claim about the product, not as proof of a condition, because marketing copy and terms regularly disagree.
3. Independent primary sources. Regulator guidance, court opinions, statute text, and measurement reports that publish their sample size and period.
4. Third-party directories and reviews. Used only where no vendor page states the figure, always labelled as third-party, and never accepted from a single source alone.

What competitor reviews are used for

Affiliate blogs and network comparison articles are read carefully, and none of their numbers are copied. In this vertical those articles reproduce each other's figures for years after the underlying condition has changed, which is how a deposit minimum from 2021 ends up in a 2026 review. They are read for one purpose: finding the questions nobody has answered, so this site can answer them. What that produces is visible in the publication itself.

Tests a claim has to pass

• Traceability. The claim resolves to a named source with a date. Anything that traces only to another article is dropped.
• Arithmetic. Prices and volumes are recalculated rather than quoted. A rate card that implies an impossible unit cost gets that arithmetic published alongside it.
• Internal consistency. A figure that contradicts another figure on the same page is resolved before publication, not left for the reader to notice.
• Substitution. If a sentence stays true when the brand name is swapped for a competitor, it carries no information and is cut or made specific.

What happens to gaps

Some things cannot be verified without funding an account or signing an agreement. Live bid tables inside advertiser cabinets, tiered cashback rates and exact publisher acceptance criteria all fall into that category. These are published as open gaps, named explicitly, rather than filled with an estimate that would read as fact. Anyone able to close one is invited to write in through the contact page.

Where sources conflict and neither is a vendor page, both figures are shown as a range. A single tidy number would be more comfortable to read and less honest. The limits this places on how figures should be used are set out in the terms.

Dating and re-checks

Every threshold, rate and legal deadline carries the month it was verified. Deposit minimums and payment rails are re-checked on a rolling basis, and regulatory dates are re-checked whenever an enforcement deadline passes. When a figure changes, the page is updated and the change is handled under the corrections rules in the editorial policy.