Editorial policy

This page sets out what Spout & Sink will and will not publish, and how to hold us to it. It is short on purpose: a policy nobody can remember is not a policy.

We accept no payment for a recommendation. We accept no sponsored placements. We accept no free product in exchange for coverage, and no manufacturer sees a page before it publishes.

Affiliate commission from retailer links is our only revenue, and it never affects a ranking position or a verdict. That is easy to assert, so here is the structural reason it holds: our picks are chosen on published specifications that anyone can check against the sources we link, and commission rates vary by retailer rather than by product. We have nothing to gain from ranking a worse product higher and something real to lose.

This matters in this category specifically. It is common in kitchen fixtures for the page that ranks for an installation query to be recommending a product the author was given by its manufacturer, disclosed in a line at the bottom. We do not take that arrangement, which is why we can use the word independent about the editorial model rather than as a slogan.

• It is discontinued or we cannot verify it is still sold. It comes off the page. A recommendation for a model you cannot buy is worse than no recommendation.
• Its specification changes. Manufacturers revise models without changing the name. When we notice, the figures are updated and the reasoning is re-checked against them.
• A better-specified product appears at a comparable price. The picks are not a loyalty scheme.
• A recurring, specific failure pattern emerges in owner feedback at scale. We will demote or remove on that basis, and say why.

• Publish a claim we cannot source. If no manufacturer or lab published the figure, the page says so.
• Claim testing we did not do. No "in our testing", no "after six weeks of use", no first-hand anecdotes. We have none, so there are none.
• Invent prices, ratings, review counts, decibel readings or grind times. There is nowhere in this site's content model to store a price or a rating, which is deliberate.
• Publish fabricated reviews or testimonials. There are none anywhere on this site, and there never will be.
• Invent credentials for the author. No trade license, no years in the trade, no certifications beyond what the publisher has actually established.
• Use AI-generated fake test results, or present synthesized material as measurement.
• Keep a recommendation live for a product we can no longer verify is sold.

We emit Product, ItemList, Article, HowTo, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList structured data, and deliberately not Review, reviewRating or aggregateRating. We run no test lab and hold no first-party ratings, so marking an editorial opinion up as a product rating would misrepresent it to search engines as well as to readers. We also emit no price in structured data, because we publish none.

We publish no LocalBusiness data either — no address, no telephone. Spout & Sink is a publisher with no premises, and inventing either would be fabrication of exactly the kind this page forbids.

If something here is wrong, tell us: contact@spoutandsink.com, or the form on the contact page. Corrections are read before anything else in the inbox.

Factual errors are fixed promptly. Substantive corrections — a wrong specification, a wrong recommendation, a product that turned out to be discontinued — are noted on the page rather than changed silently, because a page that quietly rewrites itself is not a source you can rely on. Typos and clarifications are simply fixed.

• Product pages are reviewed against current availability, and every page carries a genuine "last reviewed" date rather than a deployment timestamp.
• Specification figures are re-checked against the manufacturer's current published documentation when a page is reviewed.
• Guides and troubleshooting pages are updated when the procedure or the available parts change. The procedure for fitting a faucet has not changed in twenty years, and we are not going to re-date a page to look fresh.
• Nothing is re-dated without being re-read. A changed date on this site means somebody went through the page.

Every page is written and reviewed by Ryder M., and the byline appears on the page and in the structured data. The publisher is Magoo Media Group, credited in the footer of every page. More on both on the about page.

Every commercial link is marked, routed through a resolver that carries our Amazon Associates tag, and preceded on the page by a short disclosure — above the first such link, not only in the footer. The full statement is on affiliate disclosure. We publish no prices, so there is no stale number attached to any of it.