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 worth mentioning, it is always attributed and dated — e.g. “Amazon rating: 4.6/5 across 5,900+ Amazon reviews (August 2026)” — and never presented as GiftCat’s own rating or 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