Source hierarchy
Every published fact has a source and a check date. We prioritize, in order:
- Current official vendor documentation for product and pricing claims.
- Independent laboratory reports (such as AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives) for the exact product and version tested.
- First-party reproducible tests — only when we have genuinely performed them.
- Other independent reporting, clearly attributed.
Verification and the publish guard
A claim is only published when it is verified against its source, not expired, and matched to the exact product, plan, locale and time. Until then it is withheld and the page shows a neutral note rather than an unverified figure. We never invent prices, plan names, discounts, test scores or expert profiles.
If we haven’t tested it
Where we have not run hands-on testing, we say so explicitly and label the piece a documentation-based overview. We do not write “we tested” unless we did.
Recommendations and ranking
Editorial recommendations by use case (for example “for families” or “for multiple devices”) are backed by written reasoning. We do not publish star ratings or numeric scores unless we can also publish a reproducible rubric — the weights, the data provenance, how missing data is handled, and a change log. Commercial relationships never silently determine ranking.
Disclosure
We may earn a commission on some links. That relationship is disclosed near the relevant recommendation, not just in the footer. See our affiliate disclosure.