How we vet brands

Verdicts describe recorded evidence about a brand, not testing of every product. Public evidence can include:

1. Curated review. Our own research decisions always win.
2. Known-brand lists. A hand-vetted core list plus the community-maintained, MIT-licensed AmazonBrandFilterList (3,900+ brands).
3. Company records. Wikidata company entities: founding year, official website, parent company, country.
4. Name analysis. Brand names are scored against patterns typical of disposable marketplace brands: all-caps strings with few vowels, unpronounceable consonant runs, improbable letter pairs.

Trusted and Established brands appear in normal shopping. Unverified means the available evidence is insufficient for those verdicts; you can include these brands explicitly. Suspect and Flagged brands remain outside normal recommendations. Brand pages show recorded evidence, and verdicts can be revisited as new evidence appears.