Editorial Policy

This is the standard every PestWatchDog page is held to. The Editor-in-Chief owns it; readers enforce it by calling us out at /contact when we slip.

• Primary sources first. Prices from mystery-shop quotes and companies' own published rates; contract terms from actual agreements and published policies; reputation data pulled directly from BBB, Trustpilot, ConsumerAffairs, and PissedConsumer; industry data from named sources (regulators, CDC, NPMA, established cost databases).
• Everything dated. Volatile facts — prices, ratings, review counts, fees — carry an "as of" date, because a rating without a date is a rumor.
• Estimates labeled. When a figure couldn't be directly verified, it says "(estimate)" on the page. We'd rather look uncertain than be wrong quietly.
• Customer quotes. Review quotes are close paraphrases of real reviews, attributed by platform and approximate date. We don't invent quotes, composite them without saying so, or strip context that changes meaning.

Every review and comparison is checked before publication against a claims list: each score traced to the methodology, each price to a source, each fee to a document or complaint record, each pro and con to evidence. Superlatives ("best," "cheapest," "worst contract experience we rank") must be defensible from our own data set. A second editor signs off on every scored page.

Scores, prices, and terms are re-verified on a quarterly cycle; material changes between cycles (fee changes, ownership changes, complaint-pattern shifts) trigger off-cycle updates. Every page displays a last-updated date. Pages that can no longer be verified get fixed or unpublished — not left to rot.

If we published it and it's wrong, we fix it on the page, date the correction, and note what changed. No silent edits to substantive facts. Corrections requests go to corrections@pestwatchdog.com with the URL and evidence; verified factual errors are corrected promptly — typically within 2 business days of verification. Companies we cover get the same channel as readers, and no faster one.

Our scores are built from documented evidence — published terms, mystery-shop pricing, and third-party reputation data at volume — not from a single anecdote or a vendor demo. Where we make hands-on observations about DIY products, the page says what we actually did. We never claim testing we didn't perform: if a page says "reported by customers," that's a complaint-record finding, not our experience, and it's phrased that way on purpose.

PestWatchDog uses AI tools to assist with drafting, data organization, and consistency checking. Every published page is directed, fact-checked, and edited by humans who are accountable for it, under the standards above: scores are computed from our methodology, prices come from our own verification work, and no page publishes without human editorial sign-off. AI is never used to fabricate testing, experiences, reviews, or credentials. If our use of AI materially changes, this section changes with it.

Commercial relationships (see /legal/affiliate-disclosure) are firewalled from editorial: writers don't see commission data when scoring, partners don't preview coverage, and nobody outside the editorial team can change a score. Full detail on who does what: /team.