One standard, written down.

Editorial independence

Every ClearValue brand keeps a wall between the desk that reviews products and the side that earns from them. No advertiser, affiliate partner, or issuer sees a rating before it publishes, pays for a higher placement, or decides which products get covered. Reviewer compensation is never tied to a product’s ranking or to whether a reader acts on a recommendation.

When a commercial relationship exists, it is disclosed on the page where it applies — not buried in a footer. If a partnership ever conflicted with what the methodology says, the methodology wins and the partnership goes, not the other way around.

How ratings are produced

Each brand owns one lane and publishes the methodology it scores by, so a reader who disagrees with a rating can see exactly which inputs produced it. A rating is a function of stated criteria and weights, applied the same way to every product in the category — not a reviewer’s mood or a partner’s budget.

• ◈Published criteria. The scoring inputs and their weights are written down and public for each brand's category.
• ◈Applied uniformly. The same framework scores every product in the lane, so rankings reflect fit, not favoritism.
• ◈Ranked by fit, not commission. Ordering follows the methodology's output. What a product pays never moves it up the list.
• ◈Re-scored as facts change. When a product's terms change, its rating is revisited and the update is dated.

The per-brand methodologies live on each brand’s own site under its “how we score” documentation. This standard is the constitution; those are the statutes.

Sourcing and evidence

Money content is consequential, so claims carry their receipts. Rates, fees, terms, and regulatory statements are attributed to a primary source — the issuer, lender, or the governing rule — and dated, because the number that was true last quarter may not be true today. Where terms vary by lender, state, or applicant, we say so rather than quoting a single figure as universal.

Our content is educational. It is not personalized financial, legal, or tax advice, and no ClearValue brand is a party to any credit, card, or financing agreement.

Corrections policy

We get things wrong sometimes; the standard is what we do next. Substantive errors are corrected promptly, dated, and noted on the page they affect — we surface a material fix rather than quietly editing it away. Readers can flag an error and get a response; if the flag is right, the correction goes up and the record shows it.

To report an error, write to hello@clearvaluemoney.com with the page and the specific claim.

Affiliate transparency

The brands earn through disclosed affiliate and referral arrangements, stated on the page where they apply. Compensation never influences a review’s scoring, its ordering, or which products a brand covers. That separation is the whole claim — so we make the money model easy to check, not easy to miss.

The quality gate

A lane does not join the audited ClearValue family by putting the wordmark on a page. It has to clear a gate first: a real published methodology with a named review desk, a documented track record in its category, and a clean pass on our compliance and voice review. Until a lane meets that bar, it is not held out as part of the standard-bearing family — which is why a brand still being defined to this level appears without the family endorsement it has not yet earned.