How we research
This page describes the working method behind everything published here. It is deliberately specific, because “we research carefully” is what every site says. The rules below are the ones we can be held to.
Who does the work
Everything on this site is written and reviewed by Karen Taylor, director of publication for Burksled s.r.o. There is no anonymous content pool, no outsourced copywriting and no generated filler published without review. If a page carries a byline, that person stands behind it and can be written to directly at [email protected].
The source hierarchy we use
When a claim can be checked, we check it against the highest-ranking source available, in this order.
- The vendor’s own current published material for anything about a product: what is in a tier, what a licence covers, what a guarantee promises. A vendor is the authority on its own product, and where our page and the vendor diverge, the vendor prevails. We say so on the page itself.
- Independent testing laboratories for detection and performance questions — AV-TEST, AV-Comparatives and SE Labs — read from their own published reports, never from a secondary summary.
- Public-sector and inter-governmental reporting for threat landscape questions: ENISA, Europol, CISA and, for Czech readers, NÚKIB.
- Primary legal texts and official guidance for anything about consumer or data-protection rights, rather than a law firm’s summary of them.
- Vendor documentation for platform behaviour, such as Microsoft’s own documentation for what Windows does by default.
Press coverage and other publishers’ articles are used to find things worth checking. They are not themselves treated as evidence and are not cited as sources.
What we will not state
- A statistic without a source and a date. A detection percentage with no test round attached is not information.
- A price. Consumer security subscriptions run on rotating promotions. Any figure we printed would be wrong within weeks, so we describe the billing structure instead and send you to the order screen for numbers.
- A specification we cannot find in the vendor’s own material. Where a figure is known to change between countries and promotions — a storage allowance, a device count, a guarantee period — we label it as the listed figure at the time of writing and tell you to confirm it.
- A superlative. “Best”, “unbeatable” and “number one” are not findings.
- A score or star rating of our own. We do not run a laboratory, so we have no basis for one.
How uncertainty is handled
Where something is genuinely uncertain, the page says so in plain words rather than smoothing it over. Three formulations recur and each means something precise: “Norton lists…” means we are repeating a vendor figure we could read but not independently verify; “commonly…” means a pattern we have seen across the market but cannot pin to a single authoritative number; and “confirm before you buy” means we know the value varies by country or promotion and we are telling you not to rely on us for it.
How commercial decisions are kept separate
The decision about what to write, and what conclusion to reach, is made before and independently of any commercial arrangement. An advertiser never sees a page before publication, never has approval over wording, and cannot ask for a paragraph to be changed or removed. Commission rates play no part in which product is covered or what is said about it. Where an article’s conclusion is that many readers should not buy the product it links to, that conclusion stays in — as it does on our main article, which lists five situations in which the product is the wrong purchase.
The corresponding obligation on the reader’s side is disclosure, and it is absolute: a disclosure bar at the top of every page, a disclosure box before any promotional content, a visible “partner link” label on every commercial button including in the sidebar, and a commission note directly beneath each one. The full terms are in the affiliate disclosure.
Review and re-checking
Every page carries a publication date and a last-reviewed date, and the two are separate on purpose. Pages that describe products are re-checked against the vendor’s current material at least annually and whenever a reader tells us something has changed. Guides that describe mechanisms rather than products change more slowly and are re-read on the same annual cycle. When a re-check changes a substantive claim, the change is logged.
When we get it wrong
Errors are corrected in place, promptly, and recorded rather than quietly erased. Substantive corrections — anything that changes what a reader would conclude — are noted on the page and listed in the public corrections log. Typographical fixes are not logged. The full procedure, including how quickly we aim to respond, is in the editorial policy.
Reports of errors are welcome from anyone, including from the vendors we write about and from their competitors. Send them to [email protected] with the page address and, if you have one, a source.
Illustrations
Every diagram on this site is an original SVG file drawn by us for the page it appears on. We use no vendor screenshots, no brand artwork and no stock photography — partly because that would be a trademark and copyright problem on an advertising-funded page, and partly because a diagram we drew is one we can be held responsible for. Each has a title, a description, real alternative text and a caption, and each is served from this domain. Nothing on this site is loaded from anyone else’s server.