Policy

Editorial policy

The rules Hydration Rated operates under. They exist to keep the commercial side of the site from touching the recommendations.

Independence

• No brand can pay for inclusion, position, or a favourable description.
• Products are selected and ranked before any affiliate link is attached. Ranking data and link configuration live in separate files for exactly this reason.
• Commission rates are not a ranking input.
• We publish criticism of products we earn commission on. If a page has no drawbacks listed for any product, it is not a review.
• We have no financial stake in any of the brands covered, and we accept no sponsored posts or paid guest content.

Claims about health

• We describe what a product contains, not what it cures. "Provides 1,000 mg of sodium" is a factual claim we can source. "Prevents cramp" is a claim about physiology that the evidence does not support in the confident form supplement marketing usually gives it, and we do not make it.
• Where evidence is genuinely mixed or thin, we say so rather than picking the flattering interpretation.
• Where a product carries real risk for an identifiable group — people with kidney disease, hypertension, or on potassium-sparing medication — we say so on the page, not in a footer.
• Nothing here is a substitute for individual medical advice, and we do not pretend it is.

Sourcing

• Nutrition figures come from manufacturer labels and support documents, cited per page.
• Physiological background comes from government health agencies and peer-reviewed literature, linked in the sources section.
• We do not cite other affiliate sites as sources of fact.

Corrections

Errors get fixed promptly. Where a correction materially changes a recommendation, we note the change and the date rather than editing silently. Formulation changes by manufacturers are treated as updates and the "last checked" date on the affected review is revised.

Use of AI

We use AI tooling to help draft and structure content on this site. We are saying so plainly because readers increasingly ask, and because a site that asks you to trust its numbers should not be coy about how it was made.

What that does and does not mean:

• Every number is verified by a human against the source. No nutrition figure is published because a model produced it. Each one is read off a manufacturer's supplement facts panel or support documentation, and the source URL and check date are published on the review.
• Certifications are checked against the certifier's own register, not against a badge on the packaging or a model's recollection.
• Editorial judgements — what to recommend, what to rank where, and what to warn about — are human decisions.
• We do not publish AI-generated imagery as photography, and we do not use AI-generated portraits as author photos.

If you find an error, it is ours regardless of how it got there. Tell us and we will correct it and note the change.