Editorial policy
The rules we work to, published so you can hold us to them, and a dated log of every correction we have issued.
Independence
- No brand can pay for placement, for a higher position, or to have a criticism removed. Sponsored placements: 0.
- We accept no free product. Free products accepted: 0.
- Commission does not decide rankings. Rankings follow a published method whose first criterion is a certification traceable to a certifying body.
- We publish the answer that costs us the sale when that is the answer. Several pages here exist to talk a reader out of buying anything.
Standing prohibitions
These are absolute and they apply to every page, every product entry and every piece of structured data on this site.
- Never claim to have tested, owned or handled a product. Units we claim to have tested: 0, and the content model has no field that would let a page imply otherwise.
- Never imply a credential we do not hold. No expert panel, no “medically reviewed by”, no lab, no water treatment certification, no clinician.
- Never use tenure language. No “long-time”, no “veteran”, no “N years”, no “seasoned”.
- Never invent a price, rating, review count or test result. Prices render from a live retailer feed or not at all. We publish no score, and our structured data emits no Review or rating node.
- Never claim a shower filter softens water. It is the central factual error in this category and we correct it rather than repeat it.
- Never publish a specification without a source. Our content model makes this mechanical: a figure is either a value with a source URL or an explicit “not published”. There is no third state.
Sourcing standards
- Certification claims cite the certifying body’s own listing, with the standard number and the body named.
- Specifications cite the manufacturer’s own published page or listing, never a review site’s figure.
- Lab results are credited to whoever produced them, by name and with a link. Citing a competitor’s data by name is a trust signal, not a weakness.
- Health and efficacy claims cite published research, and we state what the evidence does not support as well as what it does.
- Where a source is brand-owned, the citation label says so, because the reader is entitled to weigh that themselves.
- Where sources conflict, we show both and say so rather than picking the one that suits the recommendation.
Update cadence
dateModified is updated only when content actually changes — never on the daily price redeploy. A site that claims every page changed every day trains search engines to stop believing its dates, which costs us the one honest re-crawl signal we have.
Corrections
A correction is triggered by any factual error: a wrong specification, a misread certification, a mischaracterized study, a broken source link. We fix it, and we log it here with the date and what changed. We do not quietly edit and move on.
Report an error to info@thefiltertap.com or through the contact form. Corrections are answered before anything else in the inbox.
Correction log
No corrections issued yet
The Filter Tap published its first pages on 2026-09-01. When a correction is issued it will be listed here with the date, the page and what changed. An empty log on a site this new is a statement of fact rather than a boast, and it will not stay empty forever — nobody compiling this many figures gets all of them right.
What we do not cover
- Whole-house water treatment. Where a reader’s answer is a softener or an iron filter we say so and send them elsewhere, because we have compiled no specifications for that equipment and would be guessing.
- Medical advice. We report what published research shows about water, hair and skin, including where it shows nothing. We are not clinicians and this site employs none.
- Markets outside the United States. Pricing, retail availability and certification regimes differ, and a US page would mislead a reader elsewhere.