Our Editorial Guidelines

EXPERTS YOU CAN TRUST

Our content is written by Compare the Market experts, who have deep knowledge across the products and services we compare.

We also work with leading industry experts outside of Compare the Market. We welcome guest authors who write new articles, as well as confirm and approve the information we provide on other pages.

How do we choose our guest authors and reviewers?

We only work with guest authors and reviewers who are expert voices within their industry. You may recognise some of them from the press, media and TV, providing commentary on their markets, while others have long careers working in industry regulation, compliance and more.

WE’RE FCA REGULATED

Compare the Market is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) (Firm Reference Number: 778488), ensuring we meet the highest standards across the financial services market for the insurance, mortgage and consumer credit products we compare. You can see our regulatory permissions on the FCA’s Register: https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/financial-services-register

BACKED BY DATA, ENHANCED BY AI

Our content is supported by our extensive data across products and customers. We provide you with prices and money-saving opportunities for our products, so you know how much the majority of people could expect to pay and save when comparing through us. We refresh this data on a quarterly basis, so we’re regularly up to date with what our provider partners are doing.

We also collate data from respected and trustworthy third parties, including government sources such as the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and gov.uk.

We also use AI in a number of ways:

• To improve the quality of our content. This helps us monitor content performance, optimise for search results, enhance readability and validate information. All of this helps you find the information you need.
• To assist content creators. Our authors will sometimes ask an AI to create a first draft, based on our extensive research and asks. However, like any first draft, it still needs to go through further human checks, as detailed below.

OUR EDITORIAL PROCESS TO ENSURE ACCURACY AND CLARITY OF CONTENT

To ensure our content is accurate, insightful and trustworthy, Compare the Market has a rigorous editorial process:

We have a number of principles we apply to content production:

1. No new content or updates to our content to go live without at least one expert (as well as the original writer) having reviewed it. This also applies to content assisted by AI where a human will always review it before going live.
2. Where newly written content directly links you to one of our comparison journeys or a third party product provider then it will be reviewed by at least two experts (as well as the original writer), to ensure it meets the high standards expected from Compare The Market, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). This also applies to significant updates to these pages.
3. We will sometimes go further on an ad hoc basis and seek a review from an external expert where in our judgement the topic is particularly risky, or where we simply want another opinion with fresher eyes.
4. All content with detailed product information will go through a rigorous research process spearheaded by an expert in that topic before any words are put on a page.
5. Content is re-reviewed and fact-checked on a regular basis to ensure it remains accurate and relevant. The exception are news articles (see below).

REGULAR UPDATES

We regularly review content across our site, including facts, figures and other data, to bring you the relevant information you need to make great financial decisions and save money. This applies to articles and guides that live forever but where key info changes over time.

This could be the introduction of a new product or service, new laws or legislation, or an evolving trend within the market.

Across the site, you’ll be able to see when each piece of content was “published” or “last updated”. That way, you can be sure you’re getting relevant, up-to-date information.

Like newspapers, we don’t update news articles as the nature of news means it’s relevant at the point it’s published but not afterwards.

EDITORIAL INTEGRITY

We want to empower you to make great financial decisions. We’ll give you as much information as we can to help you, but we don’t provide financial advice. We simply provide you with the facts that could help you find ways to save money. From there, it’s up to you.

While we have rigorous processes to ensure pin-point accuracy, like all human beings (and meerkats) we occasionally make mistakes. Where that happens, we will correct any errors ASAP.