How we research and rank

Where the rating comes from

A product's star rating is the arithmetic mean of the numeric ratings listed in the Rating sources box on its page, each normalised to a 5-point scale (a 9/10 becomes 4.5, an 85/100 becomes 4.25). Every source counts equally — we don't up-weight bigger publications or the reviewer we happen to agree with. That trade-off is real: on a two-source product one outlier moves the score a long way. The rule is at least visible and identical in every category.

This is checkable. Add up the numbers listed on any product page, divide by how many there are, and you should get the score we print. Some entries in that box read “Reviewed — no score”: those are outlets that reviewed the product and published no number, so they carry a link and a quote but are not part of the arithmetic. The line under the box tells you how many were. Rankings then follow the scores mechanically — no editor reorders a list, and across all 351 guides there is no product ranked above one with a higher score. If you find a page where the math doesn't reconcile, that's a bug; tell us through the contact form and we'll recompute it.

Two kinds of number, and how to tell them apart

Plenty of good reviewers never print a score. They write a clear verdict in prose and leave it there. We use both kinds of review, and we label which is which.

Where a publisher states a number, we record it. That number is read off the review page itself — usually from the schema.org structured data publishers embed for search engines, sometimes from a printed score in the body copy. Across the 5,392 citations currently on the site, 2,713 (50%) are of this kind.

Where a publisher reviewed the product and printed nothing we could turn into a number, we say that too. 205 citations (4%) sit in that third category: a real review, linked and quoted, contributing no figure to any average. They appear in the sources box as “Reviewed — no score”. We would rather show you the review and admit there is no number than drop the outlet or invent one.

Where a publisher reviews a product without scoring it, we derive a rating from the review's content. A language model reads the full article or video transcript and returns a 1.0–5.0 rating plus a verbatim quote capturing the reviewer's verdict. That is 2,474 citations (46%) — the larger share, and we'd rather say so than bury it. These are marked with an asterisk (*) everywhere they appear, and 96% of them display the quote they were drawn from, right next to the score. The quote isn't decoration: it is string-matched against the text we fetched from that page, so a quote that doesn't actually appear in the source is rejected before publication. Click through, read the reviewer's own words, and judge whether our number matches their conclusion.

A derived rating is an interpretation, not a measurement, so it gets a guardrail: when a product has two or more publisher-stated scores, any derived rating sitting more than 1.5 points from their median is discarded rather than averaged in. The same test runs in reverse — a structured-data score that contradicts several quote-backed reads by more than 2 points is treated as a mis-scrape and dropped, because publishers' own markup is wrong more often than you'd hope. Discarded numbers don't appear in the source list, so what you see is what we averaged.

How many sources sit behind a score

It varies by product, and the honest answer is that some scores rest on very little. Of the 1,797 products on the site right now:

• 1,223 (68%) have three or more cited reviews
• 409 (23%) have exactly two
• 156 (9%) rest on a single review

Two rules produce that shape. Our research stops looking once it has four usable citations for a product, which is why most land at three or four rather than a dozen. And a product now needs at least two citations to clear the publishing gate — the single-source products predate that gate and are still on the site pending re-research.

We don't hide the count. The source total appears in the byline of every product page, in the comparison table of every guide, and the full list of publications with their individual scores is on the product page. A 4.6 from one review and a 4.6 from six are different things, and you can see which one you're looking at before you spend money.

What this method can't see

Syndication. We count one score per publication — no publication is cited twice on the same product. (Two independent YouTube reviewers can both appear; they share a generic label but are different creators with different links.) What we can't catch is two publications reporting the same underlying test: a magazine re-running a sister title's lab results is two domains and one test. We count by domain, so some multi-source scores are thinner than the count suggests.

Provenance labels. We tag each citation with how the number was obtained. Spot-checking those tags against live pages, we've found cases where the tag is wrong — a score lifted from body copy recorded as if it came from structured data. The publication, the score, and the link are what we display and those check out; treat the internal provenance tag as the less reliable field.

Our own testing — there isn't any. No lab, no review units, no hands-on time with any product on this site. If you want teardowns and measurements, follow the source links; those reviewers did the work. What we add is the aggregation: finding the reviews, normalising the scores, and putting the disagreement in one place.

Whether three independent reviews is even the right bar is a fair question — a single rigorous instrumented test can be worth more than five hands-on impressions, and our method treats them identically. We're not claiming to have solved that. We're claiming to show you the inputs.

Where the pros and cons come from

For each product we read several professional review articles, browse the most upvoted Reddit threads in the relevant communities, and pull transcripts from the most-watched review videos on YouTube. The pros and cons you see are synthesised from that pool of source material — they reflect what reviewers and owners are actually saying.

How we choose the shortlist

You give us a starting product. We search the open web for established comparables in the same category, score the candidates by how often they appear in “best of” lists and head-to-head comparisons, and pick the top 4–5.

How we compare them

After every product has been researched independently, we run a final head-to-head pass that compares each one against all the others in the shortlist. That's where the “How it compares” section on each product page comes from. It's written by referencing the others by name, not in isolation.

Affiliate disclosure

Some links on this site are affiliate links. When you click through and buy something on Amazon, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This never changes how products are ranked or what we say about them — the ratings come from independent reviewers we don't pay or partner with.