Methodology
How DogFoodBuyer.com ranks dog food, where the data comes from, and what affiliate links do (and don't) influence.
Data sources
Every public claim on a brand or product page is backed by an evidence row in our database. Sources are tiered:
- Tier 1 — Regulated. FDA pet food recall feed, FDA advisories. Trusted automatically; trigger urgent review when an event is detected.
- Tier 2 — First-party brand. Official brand websites, product pages, brand newsrooms. Trusted after parser-version match.
- Tier 3 — Merchant. Chewy, Petco, Amazon, brand DTC stores. Trusted for price, stock, and availability — not for nutrition or AAFCO claims.
- Tier 4 — Community. Reddit, forums, public discussion. Surfaces only as “recent discussion” cards on brand pages. Never edits factual fields.
Health score
Every product is scored 0–100 on completeness, freshness, trust, link inbound count, offer count, and image presence. The exact field weights are documented in the open data model. Products below the index threshold (70) stay noindex regardless of how recently they were published. Products with active recall events fall to degraded state automatically.
Editorial rank vs commerce
The most important rule on this site: affiliate commissions never influence the editorial rank order. The state machine that scores products has no awareness of commission rates, EPC, or merchant payouts. Affiliate performance influences only the merchandising surfaces — “best current deal”, “popular merchant”, “featured savings” — and even then only on top of the editorial baseline. The two systems live in separate plugins by design, so this firewall is enforced in code, not policy.
What we don't do
- We don't write veterinary advice. Nothing on this site replaces a conversation with a vet who knows your dog.
- We don't auto-publish scraped content. Every imported entity lands as a candidate and is reviewed before going public.
- We don't reward brands for paying us. We accept affiliate commissions but they don't move rank.
- We don't fake reviews or invent ratings. Third-party ratings, when shown, are labeled as such.
Affiliate disclosure
Outbound clicks are tracked through
/go/{offer_id}/ URLs that log the click for our reporting and append affiliate parameters before redirecting. Bot traffic is filtered out so we never inflate merchant counts.
Corrections
Spot a factual error? Use the contact link in the footer. Field-level corrections are versioned in our evidence table — every change is logged, attributed, and recoverable.