Editorial Policy

Independence

No advertiser, manufacturer, retailer or affiliate network has any input into what appears on this site. None has seen a page before publication. None has been offered the opportunity to review, approve, amend or preview coverage, and no such arrangement will be entered into without being labeled on the page it affects.

Clear Carafe has joined exactly one affiliate program — Amazon Associates. It has no Commission Junction connection and no Awin connection, which means the majority of the brand-direct links on this site earn nothing whatsoever. The buy button says which is which. The full commercial picture is on the affiliate disclosure page.

We accept no sponsored placements, no paid rankings, no paid inclusion, no guest posts and no free or discounted products in exchange for coverage. There is no arrangement under which money changes what a page says.

How a product gets considered at all

A product enters the shortlist for one of three reasons: it holds a third-party certification for the specific claim the page is about; it is a market-dominant option a reader is likely to encounter and therefore needs an assessment of, favorable or not; or it fills a genuine gap in the tier being covered — for instance, the only route to a particular contaminant reduction without plumbing work.

Popularity alone is not a qualification, and neither is commission rate. Several best-selling filters appear on this site specifically to explain why they are the wrong purchase for the problem the page is about.

How a pick gets chosen

The ranking criteria are set out in full on the methodology page and applied in this order: third-party certification for the specific claim, by standard and model number; published independent laboratory results where they exist; manufacturer performance data sheets; then computed cost-per-gallon and capacity arithmetic from published specifications. Marketing copy is not an input at any stage.

Two rules constrain the output. Every roundup must name at least one product or category a reader should walk past, with the reason. And every product must carry an explicit statement of who it is not for. A page on which everything is recommended has not helped anybody decide anything.

What we do not claim

We have not tested these products. There is no laboratory, no test bench, no rack of units in service, and no water sent for analysis. No page here will say "in our testing," "after months of use," or "we measured," because none of it would be true.

Nobody writing for this site holds a water-treatment credential, and no page will imply otherwise. There is no expert panel, no medical review, and no professional certification behind any recommendation. The byline is an enthusiast and says so.

Nothing on this site is medical, legal or plumbing advice. Where a decision genuinely requires a laboratory test or a licensed plumber, the page says that instead of routing around it to a product.

Sourcing standards

• Primary sources first. Regulatory limits come from the EPA National Primary Drinking Water Regulations. Certification claims come from the certifier's own listing. Performance figures come from the manufacturer's published data sheet, attributed as such.
• Certification language is precise and not interchangeable. "Certified to NSF/ANSI 53 for lead" and "tested to NSF/ANSI 53 standards" are different statements, and the second is a manufacturer's self-description. Pages here distinguish between them every time.
• Numbers are traceable. Any figure that a reader could not derive themselves carries a link to where it came from. Where a number cannot be sourced, the page says the data is unavailable rather than estimating.
• No invented ratings, reviews or testimonials. There are no star ratings on this site presented as measurements, no user testimonials, and no aggregate scores derived from testing we did not do.

When a pick changes or is removed

Water filtration is a category where the underlying facts move, so a published recommendation is a dated statement rather than a permanent one. A pick is revised or removed when any of the following happens:

• The certification is withdrawn, lapses, or is found not to cover the claim we cited it for.
• The manufacturer revises the performance data sheet in a way that changes the answer.
• The product is discontinued, or the replacement cartridge is.
• A regulatory limit changes such that the reduction claim no longer clears it.
• A cost-per-gallon shift is large enough to invert the ranking on the page.

Every article carries the date its certification and specification claims were last re-checked. Commercial pages are re-verified on a rolling schedule, and a change that alters a recommendation is logged publicly on the corrections page rather than edited in silently.

Corrections and contact

If something here is wrong, we want to know, and the fastest route is info@clearcarafe.com. Factual errors are corrected promptly and logged with a date, what was wrong, and what it now says. The full correction policy is on the corrections page.