Corrections policy

Factual correction is free, for everyone, always. No payment — from a rated brand, a subscriber, or anyone else — can buy the removal or improvement of a published finding. This page states what counts as a correction, how to report one, and how quickly we respond. Every correction we make is published, dated, at /corrections.

A correction is any of the four classes below, published as a dated row on the log:

• Data — a factual input was wrong: a count, a date, a source attribution, a query result that does not reproduce.
• Methodology — a described method did not match the code that actually ran (a copy=code mismatch). Methodology changes that are ordinary version bumps — not corrections of an error — are are routed to the public methodology changelog at /changelog; no methodology change is made without a versioned entry.
• Copy — published prose asserted something that was not true when it was written, or has since become untrue and was left uncorrected.
• Citation — an attributed source, quote, or reference was misattributed or no longer resolves.

A published score that moves because the underlying data changed (a new review, a licence update, a scheduled recompute) is normal operation, not a correction — it is not an error being fixed. A score that moves because the prior computation was wrong is a correction and is logged as one.

Anyone — a reader, an operator, a journalist, a regulator — may report a suspected error. Use the contact form at /privacy/contact and state the affected page, the claim you believe is wrong, and (where possible) the evidence. A score-specific dispute — one that challenges a factual input to a published score rather than a research or editorial claim — instead follows the dedicated score dispute process, which shares this page's SLA and also publishes to this log once substantiated.

We do not silently edit a page to remove a wrong claim. The underlying page is corrected AND the correction is logged. The log is append-only: a later correction to an entry itself is a new, dated row, never a rewrite of the old one — see /corrections.

• Not a channel for disputing a subjective editorial judgment (which brand ranks where under a published methodology is not, by itself, an error).
• Not the methodology version timeline — that is /changelog, a dated record of ordinary version bumps, not of errors.
• Not a paid service at any tier. Reporting, verifying, and publishing a correction never has a fee, for anyone, including a rated brand or a data subscriber.

The corrections log: /corrections. Score-specific disputes: /policies/score-disputes. Research publication standards: /policies/research-standards.