Editorial policy

Independence

• No manufacturer has any input into rankings, and none has been offered any. We do not send drafts for review, we do not take feedback on placement, and we do not run anything past a brand before publishing.
• Zero sponsored placements. We do not accept payment for inclusion or for position. This is a real differentiator rather than a platitude: at least one competitor in this category flags paid placements inside its ranked lists.
• Zero free units accepted. We do not take manufacturer samples. Since we do not test products, there would be nothing to do with one except owe someone a favor.
• Affiliate commission is the only revenue, and the mechanics that stop it influencing rankings are set out on the affiliate disclosure.

Sourcing

• Every specification figure carries a source link. A table row without one is not publishable here, which is enforced in the content model rather than left to memory.
• Primary sources first. Manufacturer manuals and official specification pages outrank retailer listings, which outrank everything else. Where a figure comes from a listing rather than a spec page, the source label says so.
• Retrieval dates are recorded. Specifications change, and a number without a date cannot be audited.
• Gaps are shown as gaps. Where a manufacturer publishes nothing, the cell reads “not published”. We never substitute a competitor’s number, a review site’s estimate or a guess.
• Other people’s testing is attributed to them. Where a hands-on reviewer has measured something we cannot, we cite them by name with a link. Absorbing someone else’s finding as ours would convert their experience into our fabricated claim.

What we will never claim

Bristle & Bot does not test robot vacuums and does not own any. The phrases “in our testing”, “we found”, “we measured” and “in real-world use” will not appear on this site, because each of them describes contact with a machine we have not had. The same applies to credentials: Scooter M. is an enthusiast, not an engineer, a certified technician or a panel of experts, and no page here will imply otherwise.

We also do not publish star ratings or scores of our own. Where a rating appears it comes from the live retailer data and is attributed to the retailer. We do not emit review or rating structured data for products, because marking up a score we did not measure is the machine-readable version of the same lie.

Corrections

Send corrections to info@bristleandbot.com. Here is what happens to them:

• We check the claim against the source link on the page.
• If it is wrong, we fix the figure and update or add the source, and we change the page’s last-updated date so the change is visible.
• If the correction changes a ranking, we say so on the page rather than quietly reordering the list.
• We do not silently edit. A page that has been corrected shows a later update date than its publication date, which is the signal to look.

Update cadence

• Prices: refreshed automatically from a live feed. If the feed goes stale the numbers disappear rather than going out of date.
• Specification tables: re-verified against the manufacturers’ own pages quarterly, and whenever a listed model is superseded.
• Roundups: reviewed quarterly. Picks change when the data changes, not on a calendar — a roundup with a new number one every quarter is a roundup responding to publishing schedules rather than to products.
• Guides and explainers: reviewed when something they describe changes.

What triggers a re-rank

• A manufacturer publishes a figure we had recorded as not published.
• A published figure changes, or is corrected by the manufacturer.
• A model is discontinued or replaced by a successor.
• A model moves price tier substantially enough that it is competing against a different set of products.
• A reader shows us we got something wrong.

Notably absent from that list: commission rates, a new product launch on its own, and the passage of time. None of those is a reason to reorder a list.

On how this is written

The compilation, arithmetic and drafting behind these pages are assisted by software. Every specification figure is still traced to a published source and linked, which is the check that matters — a number is either on the manufacturer’s page or it is not, regardless of what wrote the sentence around it. Where we found no source, the page says so.