Two kinds of guide
There are exactly two labels on this site, and one of them appears at the top of every guide we publish. If you only remember one thing from this page, remember that the label tells you whether we have held the thing in our hands.
Researched
We have not used this equipment. The guide is built from the manufacturer’s published specifications, from published standards, and from what working creators and other reviewers report. Every figure is attributed and dated. Nothing on the page is a measurement of ours.
Tested
We bought this equipment with our own money, we own it, and we have used it for real work. The guide carries an evidence block stating what we bought, when, how long we used it, in what conditions, and what we never got round to trying.
Most of this site is Researched
That is not an apology. A guide written honestly from published specifications is more useful than a guide that pretends to first-hand experience it does not have. The label exists so you can tell the difference without having to guess.
What qualifies as Tested
A guide is only labelled Tested if all four of these are true. Three out of four is a Researched guide.
Bought with our own money at full retail price. Not borrowed, not a review sample, not a manufacturer loan.
Not unboxed and photographed. Used, for a stated number of hours, on the kind of job the guide is about.
Our own images of our own unit, not press imagery supplied by the manufacturer.
The limits are stated as plainly as the findings. This is the part that makes the rest of it worth reading.
The evidence block
Every Tested guide opens with the same five lines, in the same order, so you can check our working before you read a word of the recommendation.
What we tell search engines
The labels are not just for readers. The structured data we publish is gated on them, so a Researched guide cannot describe itself to Google as a review even by accident.
Aggregate rating stays off every page on this site, in both tiers. It tells a search engine that a body of reviewers produced a score. There is one of us. Publishing it would be the single most dishonest thing available to a site this size, and it is the reason you see star ratings on pages that have never been near the product.
Prices and specifications
Owning a drone tells you nothing about what it costs this week. Testing and pricing are separate problems, and we treat them separately.
Specifications are the manufacturer’s own published figures, attributed and dated on the page. Prices appear only as indicative bands with the month they were checked, never as an exact figure, and the buttons send you to a retailer for the number that is true today. This does not change in a Tested guide.
Who pays for the equipment
Creator Gear is funded entirely by affiliate commission, which is set out in full on the affiliate disclosure page. Equipment we test is bought at full retail price out of that income.
We do not accept review samples
No loans, no long-term test units, no early access in exchange for coverage. A borrowed product has to go back, and a favour is much harder to notice than an invoice. If that ever changes, it will be stated at the top of the guide it applies to, before you read anything else.
When the seller is also the manufacturer
Some things are made and sold by the same company, and only by them. A music retailer’s own line of acoustic panels, a furniture chain’s desk, a chair brand that sells direct, a marketplace’s own-label accessories. These are house brands, and they break the arrangement the rest of this page depends on.
Everywhere else on this site there are two separate parties: a manufacturer who publishes the specification, and a shop that sells the thing. You can check one against the other. With a house brand the manufacturer, the shop and — where an affiliate programme exists — the company that pays us are all the same company. Nobody independent is marking the homework.
We do not refuse to cover house brands. They are often the sensible answer, and pretending otherwise would make the site less useful. But three things change.
- One link, labelled for what it is. Where the maker and the seller are the same, there is a single button and it reads “Specifications published by the seller”, not “Manufacturer specifications”. That wording is the warning.
- Performance claims are treated as unverified. Dimensions, materials, weights and article numbers we cite normally — those are easy to check and cheap to get right. Absorption coefficients, load ratings, speed figures and anything describing how well the thing works are attributed to the seller on the page and labelled unverified, because the only source is the party who profits from the answer.
- Never the only option. A guide will not recommend house brands alone. At least one independently manufactured alternative stays in the comparison, so there is something checkable to judge the house brand against, even if it costs more.
We will not join a programme to monetise a house brand
Where an affiliate route already exists we will use it and disclose it in the ordinary way. We will not sign up to a retailer’s programme because a guide happens to need a button. The order matters: the recommendation is decided first, and the commercial route is found afterwards or not at all.
When a guide changes tier
A Researched guide can become a Tested one, but only forwards and only when the ownership is real. We do not retro-label old guides to make the site look more hands-on than it is, and we do not quietly upgrade a page because a product has become popular.
When a guide changes tier, the date at the top changes with it, and the evidence block tells you when we bought the equipment. If those two dates do not make sense together, we have got something wrong and we would like to know.