Editorial policy

This page sets out the standards Mud & Mat holds itself to. It is written to be enforceable rather than aspirational: every rule below is something you could catch us breaking.

Sourcing

If a claim cannot be traced to a published source or computed from one, it does not ship. "Not published" is an acceptable output on this site and appears frequently. An invented number is not.

• Product specifications come from the manufacturer's published materials or a retailer detail page, cited on the product.
• Prices and ratings come only from the live retailer data layer. A figure older than 48 hours is not shown at all - the button falls back to "Check price on Amazon".
• Industry statistics require a named organization and a link. We do not inherit another publisher's citation unchecked, and where we cannot trace a widely repeated figure to a primary source we say so rather than passing it along.
• Owner-review patterns are attributed as owner reports on the retailer listing, kept visibly separate from our own assessment.
• Our own arithmetic is shown with its inputs so you can redo it.

Independence

No brand pays to appear on this site. We do not accept sponsored placements, paid reviews, guest posts, link exchanges, or free product. No ranking on this site has ever been changed because of a commission rate, and every roundup carries a product we explicitly recommend against - including products we would earn from.

Affiliate commission is the only revenue. It is disclosed on every commercial page inline rather than only in the footer, per FTC guidance. Full detail on the affiliate disclosure page.

Language we will not use about ourselves

This is a standing list, and it exists because these are the specific claims this category routinely fabricates:

• No claim of hands-on testing - no "we tested", "in our testing", "hands-on", "our lab", or "we own".
• No credential we do not hold - no professional qualification, no "expert panel", no "reviewed by a professional".
• No tenure claim - no "long-time", "veteran", "seasoned", or any "X years" formulation.
• No implied staff that does not exist - no "our team of testers", no "our researchers spent".
• No fabricated author detail - no photo, no invented biography, no location, no backstory.
• No testimonials or customer reviews of Mud & Mat. We have no customers. There is nothing to review, so there is no testimonials section anywhere on this site.

If you find any of these on a page here, it is an error rather than a position, and we want to know.

Structured data

The visible score on a product card is editorial judgment derived from published specifications, and it is page content. It is never emitted as Review, reviewRating or aggregateRating markup. Marking an editorial score up as a product review rating would contradict our own statement that we have not tested anything, and we are not going to do that to make a rich result appear.

Price offers are emitted only when a live price exists in the data layer. We also do not publish shipping or return-policy markup, because we are not the merchant and asserting another seller's terms would be fabrication.

Corrections

1. 01Report it. Email us at info@mudandmat.com or use the contact form. Corrections are read first.
2. 02We verify against the source. If the published specification changed, we update and re-date the page. If we made the error, we fix it.
3. 03Material corrections are noted on the page. A change that alters a recommendation, a ranking or a factual claim gets a dated correction note rather than a silent edit.
4. 04Typos and formatting are fixed silently. We are not going to clutter a page with a note about a comma.

The correction we most want to hear about: any sentence anywhere on this site that implies we have used a product. That is a failure of the whole method, not a detail.

Update cadence

Every date shown on this site is a real content date. Dates are never stamped from the build, which matters because the daily price refresh redeploys the site - a build-stamped date would claim every page changed every day until nobody believed the signal.

Authorship

Articles are bylined Scooter M. and maintained with the Mud & Mat team. The byline is framed by genuine interest in the category and never by tenure, credential or experience we do not have. The author schema on every page carries a name and a link and nothing else - no job title, no credential, no image - because there is nothing else that would be true.

Mud & Mat is published by Slate Mill Group, and these standards sit alongside Slate Mill Group's published editorial standards.