How We Audit Products
A four-stage forensic validation process designed to separate marketing claims from technical reality.
Most product reviews repeat manufacturer claims. We treat marketing claims as hypotheses.
Audits are based on publicly available manufacturer specifications and independently verifiable long-term usage evidence.
No score is better than a weak score.
The Protocol
Claim Extraction
- •Marketing claims parsed
- •Structured into standardized claim cards
- •No judgment or scoring applied at this stage
Evidence Aggregation
- •Independent long-term usage sources gathered
- •Minimum of 3 independent signals required
- •Community & technical validation combination
Discrepancy Analysis
- •Claim vs. observed reality compared
- •Rigorous overstatement detection applied
- •Flags categorized as conditional or verified
Verification Score Calculation
- •Deterministic, integer-only scoring generated
- •Strictly gated by minimum signal requirements
- •Final verdict locked to the reality ledger
Data Triggers
What "Insufficient Forensic Depth" Means
A Verification Score is only issued when sufficient independent validation exists. When you see a notice for Insufficient Forensic Depth, it indicates one or both of the following:
- •Missing independent sources: The product is too new, or not enough independent third-party data exists to verify the manufacturer's claims.
- •Incomplete evidence payload: The data we have collected fails to meet the minimum threshold required by our deterministic scoring model.
By withholding a score in these cases, we prevent confusion and ensure that every Verification Score on our platform is backed by hard, undeniable data.
Disqualifications
What Disqualifies a Product
A product will fail our audit and be flagged or disqualified under the following conditions:
Inflated wattage claims
Representing peak output as sustained continuous output.
Non-independent validation
Presenting sponsored or controlled reviews as independent objective data.
Missing battery spec transparency
Obfuscating cycle life, chemistry, or usable capacity vs nameplate capacity.
Failure to meet minimum evidence threshold
Inability to gather enough independent validation signals across major parameters.