Editorial Guidelines

These are the standards every page on GiftCat has to meet before it’s published — and the rules you can hold us to. They exist because affiliate sites have earned a reputation for saying anything for a commission, and we’re deliberately building the opposite.

Honesty rules

  • We only publish claims we can stand behind. No invented statistics, no inflated “trusted by thousands” numbers, no fake testimonials.
  • Superlatives need reasons. If we call something “the best gift for a whiskey-loving dad,” the page has to explain why we think so.
  • Every recommendation includes the honest downside: who it’s not for, and what to check before buying.

Independence

Products are selected using the process described in How GiftCat Chooses Gifts. Inclusion cannot be bought: we don’t accept payment, and free products don’t obligate a listing or a kind word. Affiliate commissions (see our Affiliate Disclosure) never determine what we pick — gifts are chosen first, links added second.

Ratings and reviews policy

  • GiftCat does not currently display its own star ratings, because we haven’t collected enough first-party reviews to make one honest. When we do, they’ll be clearly ours.
  • When an Amazon rating is shown, it is always labelled as Amazon’s — the score, the number of Amazon ratings, and a note stating the rating is sourced from Amazon and that GiftCat does not collect customer reviews. It is never presented as GiftCat’s own rating, and never marked up as one for search engines.
  • “We tested” appears only when we physically used the product. Research-based picks are labeled as research.

AI policy

We use AI where it makes the site better and say so plainly: the gift advisor is AI-powered, and AI tools help us draft, organize, and tag content. AI does not decide what gets recommended, and nothing is published without human review — every page is checked by a person for accuracy and fit before going live. Our full AI-use disclosure lives in the methodology.

Affiliate disclosure placement

Every page containing affiliate links carries a visible disclosure near the links themselves — on gift guides at the top, on product pages right beside the “Check price on Amazon” button — never only in the footer. The standard wording is: “As an Amazon Associate, GiftCat earns from qualifying purchases.” Outbound affiliate links are marked as sponsored links in the page code, as search engines require.

Sourcing and originality

  • Product descriptions are written in our own words — never copied from Amazon or manufacturers. Specifications are paraphrased and re-checked.
  • We don’t rewrite competitors’ guides. Overlap in picks can happen (good gifts are good gifts); copied reasoning can’t.
  • Each page is written for its specific reader — we don’t publish templated pages with a keyword swapped in.

Corrections and updates

Found an error — a wrong price, a dead link, a claim that doesn’t hold up? Email hello@giftcat.ai and we’ll correct it promptly; factual errors get priority over everything else in the queue. Pages show a “Last updated” date that changes only when the content meaningfully changes — we don’t bump dates to look fresh.

Bylines

Content on GiftCat is published under the GiftCat Team byline and is always reviewed by a human editor before publishing. What that team looks like — a small independent operation, not a content farm — is described on our About page.

Last updated: August 2026