How matching works, and what cannot be bought
Every comparison site has the same conflict of interest. The products being compared are the people with the budget. The usual resolution is a sponsored tier, a paid listing, or a referral fee that quietly decides the order. Ours is that there is nowhere to put the money.
What plays no part in the ranking?
No paid placements or sponsored results. Product visibility based solely on your priorities.
That is a statement about the shape of the system rather than a policy we promise to keep. There is no field on a product, a plan or a price by which a vendor could supply a term of the score. There is no sponsorship table, no promotion flag, no placement fee, and no commercial relationship represented anywhere in the data the scorer reads. A vendor cannot pay us for a better position because the code has no argument for it.
If a vendor did try, it would not be a transaction. It would be a schema change, a scorer change and a deployment, each of which leaves a trail in a public repository.
What are we not stating yet?
We are not publishing the weights today
We intended this page to give you the scoring formula, term by term. While writing it we checked the formula against the production database and found that several of its inputs are not populated, and that a second scorer exists whose relationship to the first we have not established.
So we do not currently have a description of the ranking precise enough to publish. We would rather tell you that than give you a formula we cannot show is the one running. It is being re-established, and this page will carry it when it is true.
What we can tell you is the shape. A score is computed per product against the requirements a person states in their own decision: what they must have, what they would like, what rules a product out. It is recomputed when the requirements change. Two people with different requirements see different orders, which is the point of the exercise.
What would have to change for this to stop being true?
The honest version of an independence claim includes the conditions under which it would stop being true. Ours would stop being true if any of these happened:
- A commercial relationship became an input the scorer reads, whether that is a sponsorship field, a partner flag, or a weighting we sold.
- A vendor gained the ability to edit the values we hold about their own product, rather than correcting them through evidence we can check.
- The catalog stopped publishing which products are flagged for re-reading, which is what lets you tell a current answer from an old one.
If any of those changes, this page changes with it. That is the commitment worth making, because it is the one we can be held to.
See it decide
The fastest way to test an independence claim is to state requirements a sponsor would hate and see what comes back.