Editorial standards

How a claim gets onto a page

The rules every review, brief, study and board on this site is held to, and what happens when one of them is broken.

A person writes the words

Every verdict, study and guide on Sweeps Audit is written or rewritten by Noah Rafkin and checked against the records before it publishes. Software collects and sorts the evidence, and AI tools help find and summarize sources. No text published as a verdict, study or guide comes straight from a machine. Pages without a written verdict, such as the boards, show records as tables and labels and add no machine-written commentary.

Numbers come from the records

Scores, ranks, payout counts, dollar amounts and dates are read from the research database each time the site is built. A figure is never typed into the text, so the text cannot drift from the data. When a figure is incomplete, the page says how: a dollar total built from the records that carry an amount is labeled as a floor.

Negative claims need receipts

A critical claim about a named operator must rest on the operator's own words, quoted and dated, or on first-hand evidence we hold: a payout record, a screenshot, a terms snapshot. We state what the evidence shows and stop there. "Records suggest" is used when the records suggest; "is owned by" is used only when a filing or the operator says so.

Pending is not paid

A redemption we requested and have not watched arrive is reported as pending. It does not count toward any payout figure, and the page shows the date we asked for it.

Money, law and tax are information

Pages about money, state law or taxes describe what the sources say. They are not financial, legal or tax advice, rules and thresholds change, and each of those pages says so and points to the kind of professional who can advise on a specific case.

Commissions stay out of the verdicts

The site earns affiliate commissions. A commission has no input in the scoring formula, an affiliate deal does not change what a verdict may say, and operators cannot pay to be reviewed, to be reviewed sooner, or to see a verdict before it publishes.

Corrections

When a published fact is wrong, we fix it and add a dated correction note to the page that says what changed. A score that changes because the evidence changed is recalculated by the formula and the new inputs show on the review. Operators may reply to anything we publish about them; send the reply with its evidence through the contact page, and a reply that changes a fact gets a correction note like any other.