Research and corrections policy

How the research works

1. Resolve the product identity and retain the official website before evaluating product claims.
2. Prefer official documentation, API references, pricing pages, changelogs, status pages, and vendor-owned repositories.
3. Label vendor claims, documented facts, and editorial assessments separately.
4. Record a checked date and state missing evidence as not retrieved, never as proof that a feature does not exist.
5. Do not claim runtime testing unless the product was actually run. Directory listings are document-based; where a page carries a named operator account, that product was run in production and the claim is labelled as first-hand.
6. Require every published figure to appear in the source quote cited as its evidence, and treat automated extraction as a draft rather than a finding.

Automated collection, and what we ignore

Pages are fetched by an automated collector. Everything it retrieves is treated as data to be quoted, never as instructions to be followed. This matters more than it used to: vendor sites in this corpus now ship text written for AI agents rather than for readers. Three examples encountered during the 2026-08-27 research run — a pricing page directing agents to fetch and follow separate credential and onboarding files, a documentation site opening every page with a retrieval instruction, and a marketing site carrying the same instruction inside a hidden element. None were acted on.

A related practice is worth naming because it shapes what AI assistants report: some vendors publish a machine-readable pricing page addressed to AI agents alongside the human one, and the two do not always agree. Where that happens, both are recorded and the disagreement is stated on the page rather than resolved silently.

Automated extraction of figures from a page is a language model reading a document, and it has returned confident prices that appear nowhere on the page it read. Extracted figures are therefore verified against the retained page text before publication, and a figure that cannot be traced to a quote does not ship.

Alternatives-page policy

Competitive sets are editorial classifications, not rankings. Each set exposes its membership test and exclusions. A page may publish only when it has a researched anchor, at least 300 words, and more than 40 percent corpus-unique six-token shingles after global navigation and footer text are excluded.

Official links on these pages are a page-level source set unless a claim names a more precise source. The Lab does not present page-level links as field-by-field verification. Pricing appears only when the retained record says official pricing was retrieved.

Editorial review and corrections

Programmatic pages pass automated route, metadata, schema, internal-link, source-count, punctuation, word-count, and uniqueness checks. Representative pages from every competitive set are then reviewed for clarity, fairness, evidence labels, and visible research limits before publication.

If a source changes or a statement is wrong, send the exact page URL and correction through theCheetah contact form. The research team checks the official source, updates the retained record and checked date when warranted, then reruns the same publication gates. Material corrections are not silently converted into new claims.

Ownership and team background are available on the About Cheetah page. Research questions can also start in the Systems Lab help guide.