What we publish, and what we do when we are wrong

What gets published

An entry has to clear a quality gate before it can go live, and the gate is code rather than a judgement call: an entry missing the facts a reader needs to decide cannot be published, no matter who wants it there. The scoring behind it is on themethod page.

Every entry clears the same quality bar, whoever found it. A thin page is thin to you whether we went looking or somebody wrote in, so it would be dishonest to hold two standards under one masthead and disclose neither.

One thing does differ, and it is about consent rather than quality. A company that submits itself is vouching for its own claims, so we may publish from its own pages where nobody independent has covered it yet, with those sources shown. A company we found asked for nothing, so we will not publish an assessment sourced only to its own marketing. If the wider world has not written about them yet, we wait.

We publish unflattering findings. A missing feature, an opaque price, a limit that only appears after you sign up: these are the facts a buyer most needs and the ones a vendor least wants indexed. Leaving them out to keep everyone comfortable would make the index worthless in exactly the situation it exists for.

Sourcing

• Facts come from primary sources, the product itself, its own documentation and pricing pages, its repository, its public filings.
• Prices are transcribed with the date they were read, because they move and a stale price presented as current is a lie by omission.
• Where we could not establish something, the field is empty. We do not fill a gap with a plausible guess.
• A published entry is re-verified at least every 90 days, and the page shows when it was last checked.

Automated research and drafting

Entries on CitedIndex are researched and drafted by automated systems working to the standard on this page. The standard, the quality gate and every editorial decision that this page describes are owned by people.

We disclose it because it should change how you read us in both directions. It means the index is re-checked far more often than a hand-maintained one could be. It also means an error can be produced quickly and confidently, which is why the correction route below is a real mechanism with a clock on it rather than a courtesy line.

Corrections

Anyone can report an error. You do not have to be connected to the tool and you do not have to prove your case before we will look. Write to corrections@citedindex.com and point at the page.

• We reply within 3 working days, including when the answer is that we are keeping what we published and why.
• A confirmed factual error is corrected at source, so every page derived from it changes too.
• Material corrections are recorded publicly in the changelog rather than quietly edited away. A directory that revises its own history without saying so is not correctable, it is just editable.

Right of reply

If you run a listed tool and think our assessment is unfair rather than inaccurate, send us your response and we will publish it on the entry, in your words, next to the finding it answers. We will not edit it for tone. This is offered in every case, including the ones where we decline to change what we wrote.

Removal

We take an entry down on these grounds:

• The tool no longer exists or has been discontinued — we retire it with a note rather than deleting the history.
• The entry is substantially about an identifiable person rather than a business, and they ask us to remove it.
• The facts are wrong and cannot be corrected into something worth publishing.
• The law requires it, or a court orders it.
• Publishing it would expose a live security or safety risk.

We do not take an entry down on these grounds:

• The assessment is accurate and the company would prefer it were not public.
• A competitor is rated higher.
• Someone is willing to pay. There is no price at which we will remove an accurate finding, and any offer to that effect will be declined in writing.

A removal request always gets a written answer with the reason, and the right of reply above stands whether we grant it or not.

Money, and where it touches the page

CitedIndex earns from optional paid placement and sponsorship. Paid units are labelled as such wherever they appear and are never mixed into an assessment or a ranking. Paying changes where an entry is shown and how much room it gets; it cannot change what we say about it, its score, or whether it qualifies at all.

Where an outbound link earns us anything, that is disclosed on the page carrying the link. If you find a commercial relationship that is not obvious from the page itself, treat it as a defect and tell us.

Who is accountable