Trust & Transparency

Citatio's product is trust in data. This page explains, in full detail, what we guarantee, how we prove it cryptographically, and how you can check us independently. The formulas behind every number are documented on the Methodology & KPIs page.

Our principles

• The reviews are not ours. Every finding is attributed to the people who wrote the reviews. We publish short verbatim excerpts (200 characters or less), always with a link to the original review, its source, date and rating. We frame conclusions as "reviewers report", never as our own claims.
• Nothing is pay-to-play. Rankings, comparisons and awards are computed from the review data under fixed published rules. Companies cannot buy a better score, a better position or an award, including our own customers. When the data does not support an award, no award is given. We have declined customer requests for awards the data did not support, and we have retracted published awards when we judged the underlying sample too thin.
• Honest dates. A page's "last updated" date changes only when its content actually changes. First-published dates never move. We do not fake freshness.
• Honest gaps. Where a review platform only exposes part of its data publicly, or where our analysis covers only part of a corpus, we say so on the page instead of hiding it.

Cryptographic attestations

Since August 2026, everything we publish is cryptographically tamper-evident. Three kinds of commitments are created and signed with Citatio's Ed25519 key:

• Quote attestations. Every review excerpt displayed on our pages is captured in a canonical record (the exact quote, source, source link, rating, review date, page and dataset version), hashed with SHA-256 and signed. Each quote has its own public proof page.
• Review facts attestations. For every review that feeds our statistics we commit to its facts: source platform, the review's identifier at the source, star rating, review date, an anonymized author reference and our crawl time. These records deliberately contain no review text. They exist so the inputs to every average and every ranking are fixed and checkable, not so that content changes hands.
• Dataset attestations. Each published version of this website is hashed as a whole. Every page you see is provably the page that was published, unmodified since its publish date.

Every night, all new commitments are combined into a Merkle tree and the tree's root is written to Sigstore Rekor, a public, append-only transparency log operated independently of Citatio. Once a root is in the log, neither we nor anyone else can silently rewrite the records beneath it: any alteration breaks the signature and the inclusion proof.

What this guarantees, and what it does not

Guaranteed: every displayed quote is exactly what Citatio recorded at the source, unchanged since it was committed and anchored. Every statistic is computed from a fixed, committed set of observations. Published pages have not been silently edited after the fact.

Not claimed: a signature from Citatio does not mean the source platform endorses the review, and it cannot prove who originally wrote it. Only the source platform could attest that, which is why every quote links to the original where you can read it in context. For reviews collected before August 2026, the crawl date inside the record is asserted from our database rather than independently anchored; from August 2026 onward, observations are anchored the same night they are made.

Verify it yourself

1. Fetch our public key from /.well-known/citatio-signing.json.
2. Open a quote's proof page (linked as "verify" wherever proofs are surfaced). It shows the canonical record, its SHA-256 hash, the Ed25519 signature, the Merkle path and the anchored root, and it re-runs the checks live on every request.
3. Recompute independently: hash the canonical record, verify the signature against the public key, fold the hash through the Merkle path (sorted-pair SHA-256) and compare the result to the root recorded in the Rekor public log. No Citatio infrastructure is needed for this step.

Our guarantee

If you find a quote on this site that does not match its original source, a statistic that cannot be reproduced from the committed inputs under the published methodology, or a page altered after publication without a new version and date, report it to hello@citatio.ai. We investigate every report, correct errors visibly (corrections produce a new committed dataset version, never a silent edit), and publish the outcome.

Independence

Citatio is operated by Gipfel Marketing AG, Schwyz, Switzerland. Some companies covered on this site are our customers. Customer status changes what a company can see (their own dashboards and full-text tools), never what the public pages say: the same collection rules, formulas, floors and award gates apply to customers and non-customers alike, and the attestation system above makes that checkable from outside.