Editorial policy

Google asks publishers to say how they use automation. Here is the direct answer: most of this site is generated, some of it is written, and the two are separated on purpose.

What is machine-generated

Every deal card, every product page chart, every price, percentage, badge and count is produced automatically from the price observations we recorded through Amazon’s Creators API. No human writes those sentences and no language model writes them either — they are numbers rendered into a template, and the template refuses to render a claim the data does not support.

That refusal is the interesting part. Under 7 recorded observations for a product at a retailer, the generator draws no chart, prints no percentage and shows no strikethrough.

It will say one other thing, and only one: that a price has not moved. Because the record is written only when a price changes, a product with a single observation and 10 days of watching is not a product we know nothing about — it is one whose price has held every time we looked. The template states that and stops there. It still prints no percentage, no range and no chart, because it still has none. The full method.

What is written by a person

• Category introductions — what actually varies within that category and what a sensible price looks like there.
• Retailer descriptions — return window, price-match policy, shipping thresholds, and where that retailer is genuinely competitive.
• Every one of these trust pages, and every article.

Who signs the articles

Guides are published under the site’s own byline, BasketPrice editorial, with a publication date and a last-updated date in both the visible text and the structured data. We do not invent a person to put on them: a byline says who stands behind the words, and here that is the site, which answers for every one of them at the address on the contact page.

Words we do not publish

A card saying “amazing deal” tells you less than the same card saying $248, lowest since March. These phrases are blocked in the codebase, not merely discouraged:

amazing deal · unbeatable price · hurry · act fast · you won’t believe · crazy discount · must-have · game-changer

Every string on a card has to be a noun, a number, or a verb you can act on. Urgency language is banned outright: a countdown you cannot verify is a pressure tactic, not information.

Pages we decline to create

A category page asks to be indexed once it holds at least 8 live offers, and a brand page once it has 5 products. A product page asks only once search engines have shown it or its record holds at least 6 different prices: a page with a price or two on it is the retailer’s listing again. Price bands are indexed where people search for them, and our lists of best-sellers not at all, since they repeat the retailer’s sales rank. Everything else stays up for readers, linked and marked noindex.

When something is wrong

We fix it, then log it with a date at /corrections, including what the page said before. Silent edits to a page that made a claim in public are how a record stops being a record.