Editorial policy
What we will publish, what we will not, and how we fix it when we get something wrong.
This site is built entirely on other people's published numbers and our own arithmetic. That makes sourcing and correction the two things that matter most, so both are written down here rather than implied.
Independence
- No free products are accepted, from anyone, ever.
- No sponsored placements are sold and none exist on this site.
- No payment is accepted for inclusion, ranking or a favorable mention.
- No manufacturer sees a page before it publishes.
- Affiliate commission funds the site and is disclosed on every page that carries a buy link — in full here.
- Commission never decides a ranking. Where the cheaper product is the better answer, that is what we publish.
Source hierarchy
| Tier | Source | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Manufacturer spec sheets, owner's manuals and official product pages | Every specification on the site |
| 1 | Live retailer price data via our daily price check | Every price shown |
| 2 | Standards bodies, government and university extension sources | Definitions and context |
| 3 | Publishers who genuinely tested, cited by name | Only where hands-on data is needed, and we say whose it is |
| Never | Other affiliate sites, forums, AI-generated content, or memory | Nothing |
Rules that apply to every page
- Every specification cites its source, with a link to the document and the date it was checked.
- Every computed number shows its working. Not "about 45 minutes of runtime" but the division that produced it.
- "Not published" is a valid answer and appears throughout the site. We do not estimate a figure a manufacturer withheld.
- "We don't know" is a valid answer and appears wherever it is true — most visibly on the quietest mower page, where the honest finding was that nobody publishes the number.
- No claim of testing, ownership or hands-on use, anywhere, in any form. The methodology page states what we do instead.
- No invented credentials, awards or tenure.
- No fabricated reviews, ratings or testimonials. There are none on this site because there are no customers to have written them.
- No editorial score in structured data. Our visible scores are an editorial weighting of published specs, and marking them up as review ratings would assert a test result we did not produce.
- Every page shows a published date and a last-updated date. On a site whose differentiator is data freshness, a stale date is a visible failure, which is the correct incentive.
Update cadence
| Frequency | What happens |
|---|---|
| Daily | Live price refresh across every pick. Prices older than 48 hours are removed automatically. |
| On discontinuation | The pick is replaced and the page's last-updated date changes. |
| Quarterly | Every specification is re-verified against current manufacturer documentation. |
| Annually | Dated roundups are refreshed: new model year, re-ranked picks, updated titles. |
| On a new platform or voltage line | A new comparison page, and the platform matrix is updated. |
| On any content change | The AI-search files (llms.txt, llms-full.txt) are updated to match. |
Corrections
A site built on transcribed figures will occasionally transcribe one wrong, and manufacturers revise specifications without announcing it. Both happen. Here is what we do about it.
How to report an error
Write to info@mowandmeadow.com or use the contact form. Include the page and, if you have it, the manufacturer document that shows the correct figure. That makes it a five-minute fix rather than an investigation.
What we do with it
- Verify against the primary source. Not against another publisher, and not against the report itself.
- Fix the figure and every calculation downstream of it. A wrong amp-hour figure changes watt-hours, energy per minute and often a ranking.
- Update the last-modified date on every page affected.
- Mark material corrections visibly on the page. If a correction changed a recommendation, readers who saw the old one deserve to know.
- Reply to whoever reported it. People who take the trouble get an answer.
Typographical fixes and formatting changes are made silently. Anything that changes a number, a ranking or a recommendation is marked.
On AI and how these pages are written
Since it is a fair question to ask any site publishing at this volume: the specifications here were read from manufacturer pages and transcribed, the arithmetic was computed from those transcriptions, and every source is linked so you can check both. Nothing on this site is a figure recalled from memory, and no number appears without a traceable origin.
That is the standard we hold ourselves to regardless of the tools involved in producing a page, and it is the standard the methodology page describes in detail.