Editorial policy

This page is the set of rules the writing on this site is held to. It is short on purpose, and every line of it is a rule we can be held to rather than a sentiment.

1. Nothing is invented

• No invented specifications. Every figure traces to a document named on the page.
• No invented prices. Prices come from a live data layer. Where there is none, the page says "check price" and shows no number.
• No invented product identifiers. A buy link resolves to a verified product or to a retailer search — never to a guessed identifier that could send a buyer to the wrong item.
• No estimates dressed as facts. Where a manufacturer does not publish a figure, the page says exactly that.

2. No testing claims

We do not test the products we write about. No page on this site will ever say "in our testing", "hands-on", "we've used" or "tested in my yard", because none of it would be true. What we do instead is published in full on how we pick.

3. No fabricated reviews or ratings

• There are no testimonials on this site, because there are no customers to quote — The Gift Perch is a publication, not a shop.
• We do not invent, paraphrase or embellish a customer review, a reviewer name, a star rating or a review count.
• A retailer's live star rating may be displayed where it is genuinely live. It is never marked up as structured data, and it is never reproduced from memory.
• Our own scores are editorial judgments about published data. They appear as page content and never as Review or AggregateRating markup.

4. No invented credentials

The byline on this site is an enthusiast, and it says so. No page will claim a qualification, a tenure, a professional certification or an expert panel that does not exist. "Long-time", "veteran", "expert" and "specialist" are not words this site applies to itself.

5. Sources are primary

• Specifications come from the manufacturer's own documentation. A retailer listing is not a source.
• Ornithological claims — bath depths, nest box dimensions, entrance hole diameters, feeding behavior — come from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, its NestWatch program, or the National Audubon Society. Not from a blog citing them.
• Subscription terms come from the vendor's own pricing or help pages, with the date read.
• Where a primary source could not be read, the page says so and attributes the figure to whatever secondary source it came from, explicitly.

6. Every recommendation carries a reason not to buy

Every pick on this site has a "skip this if" naming a specific person who should not buy it. A list where everything wins is a list assembled from an affiliate feed, and it is the clearest signal a reader has that a page was written rather than generated.

7. Commission does not influence content

No placement is for sale. No free products are accepted. Commission rate plays no part in ranking — books pay the best rate in this niche and are ranked on merit, bird seed pays among the worst and we recommend against it, and the free Merlin app earns us nothing and leads several pages. Full disclosure.

8. Dates mean something

• Published is when the page first went up.
• Content updated changes only when the writing or the recommendations change. It is not touched by a redeploy.
• Prices verified is a separate field, because a price refresh is not an editorial update. Conflating the two would be a way of claiming freshness we had not earned.

9. Corrections are visible

If we get something wrong, we fix it and say what changed. We do not quietly edit a page and leave the date implying it was always right. Report anything at info@thegiftperch.com or through the contact form.

10. AI, and what it does not excuse

Pages on this site are drafted with software assistance. That changes nothing about the rules above: every figure still traces to a named document, every price still comes from the live layer, and nothing is published because a model produced it confidently. A fabricated specification is a fabricated specification whatever produced it.