Editorial Policy
What we source, what we refuse to publish, how often we re-check it, and what happens when we get something wrong.
Last updated
Sourcing standards
- Product specifications come from the manufacturer’s own product page, support article, manual or spec sheet, or from the named retailer listing. The source is linked on every product write-up.
- Electricity costs use the published US average residential retail rate from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, with the rate and its period stated inline so the sum can be redone.
- Consumable costs use the manufacturer’s own listed price, with the date of the check stated.
- Cat behavior, welfare and health are attributed to named authorities and linked — principally the Cornell Feline Health Center and the Ohio State Indoor Pet Initiative. These are never asserted in our own voice.
- Anything we could not verify is stated as unverified in the page body. It is never quietly omitted and never estimated.
What we will not publish
| Never | Why |
|---|---|
| 'We tested', 'our lab', 'we owned this for six months' | We have no units. It would be fabrication and an FTC endorsement problem. |
| 'Vet-reviewed', 'vet-approved', 'medically reviewed by' | We have no veterinarian. A vet claim with no vet named is trivially falsifiable. |
| 'Expert', 'specialist', 'long-time', 'X years in the industry' | Our author is framed by interest, never by tenure or credentials. |
| Invented prices, ratings or review counts | Prices come from the live data layer only; where there is none we say 'check price'. |
| Testimonials or user reviews we did not receive | We publish none at all rather than risk publishing one we cannot stand behind. |
| Review, reviewRating or aggregateRating structured data | We run no test lab; marking an editorial score up as a review rating would contradict our own copy. |
| Health or medical claims about cats | Outside our competence. We cite and link instead. |
| Fabricated social proof ('picked by 400 people today') | It is invented, and it is common in this category. |
Update cadence
| What | How often | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Prices | Daily, automatically | Anything older than 48 hours stops showing and falls back to 'check price' |
| Roundup picks and availability | Quarterly | Discontinued products are removed rather than left with a dead link |
| Computed running costs | Annually, or when the cited electricity rate moves materially | The rate and its period are stated on every page that uses it |
| Specification citations | At each quarterly review | Manufacturers revise specifications without renaming products |
The modification date on a page changes only when the content changes. The daily price check redeploys the site; it does not touch any page’s modification date, and it does not touch the sitemap’s lastmod values. A sitemap that claims every page changed every day is a sitemap nobody should believe, including search engines.
Corrections
We distinguish between two things:
- An edit — rewording, adding a section, improving a table. The modification date changes; nothing is flagged.
- A correction — a factual error in a specification, a price, an arithmetic result or an attribution. The page is fixed, the modification date changes, and where the error could have changed a reader’s decision we note what was wrong in the page itself.
To report either, email info@perchandpurr.com. If it is a number, telling us where the correct figure comes from is the fastest possible route to a fix — we can check a source in a minute, and we cannot check an assertion at all.
On AI and how these pages are written
Pages here are drafted and edited with software assistance, then checked against the sources cited on each page. That does not change any of the rules above: every specification is read off a document we link to, every computed figure shows its inputs, and nothing is published because a tool suggested it sounded right.
The reason we can say that with a straight face is that the whole site is built to be checkable. If a number here is wrong, the source link is right next to it.
Independence
Perch & Purr is funded by affiliate commission. No brand has paid for placement, no free products have been accepted, and commission rates play no part in ranking. The full disclosure is on the affiliate disclosure page, and the method that produces the rankings is on how we pick.