Editorial Policy

Independence

Workboots & Gear is funded by affiliate commissions, principally through the Amazon Associates program. That is disclosed on every commercial page and in full on our affiliate disclosure page.

Within that model, these are our commitments:

No paid placement. No manufacturer or retailer can buy a position in a shortlist, a score, or a mention. We do not sell inclusion and we never have.
No sponsored content presented as editorial. If we ever publish sponsored material it will be labeled unmistakably as such. There is none on the site today.
No manufacturer review of content. Brands do not see pages before publication and have no input into rankings or wording.
Commission rates do not affect rankings. Where a cheaper product is the better buy, we say so, and that costs us money. Several pages recommend not buying anything at all.

What we will not publish

These are absolute rather than aspirational.

Fabricated reviews, testimonials, ratings or quotes. There are no customer testimonials anywhere on this site, because we have no verified reviews to quote. Inventing them would be fraudulent and we will not do it to fill a layout.
Invented prices. Every figure comes from a live Amazon lookup with a timestamp. If no verified price exists, the page says “check price” rather than showing an old number.
Claims of testing we did not do. We do not run a lab and we do not claim first-hand use of products we have not used. Our methodology states exactly what we do.
Credentials we do not hold. Nobody here is a podiatrist, a safety engineer or an industrial hygienist, and no page implies otherwise.
Our editorial score marked up as a product review rating in structured data. The score is clearly our opinion on the page, and presenting it to search engines as a verified product rating would be misleading.
Invented specifications. Where a manufacturer does not publish a figure, we write that it is not published rather than estimating it.

Safety content

A lot of this site touches on personal protective equipment, which means getting it wrong has consequences beyond a disappointing purchase. So:

We cite the governing standard - ASTM, ANSI/ISEA, NFPA, OSHA - rather than paraphrasing it from marketing copy.
We state the limits of a protection honestly. The clearest example is the electrical hazard rating, which is widely sold as though it were insulation and is nothing of the kind.
We say when a decision is not ours to make. Your employer’s written footwear policy and any arc-flash hazard assessment outrank anything on this site.
Where a question is medical - foot pain, compression socks, cold injury - we say so and point to a clinician instead of selling a product as a treatment.

Corrections

We get things wrong, and when we do we would rather fix it visibly than quietly. If we publish a material error - a wrong specification, a mis-stated standard, a product attribute that is not true - we correct the page and note what changed and when.

Routine updates are different and are not corrections: refreshed prices, a discontinued product swapped out, a new model added. Every page shows its publication and last-updated dates so you can see how current it is.

To report an error, email contact@workbootsandgear.com or use the contact form. Corrections from readers are genuinely welcome - a reader telling us a boot has been discontinued is more useful than any amount of internal review.

Update cadence

Prices: refreshed daily, and they expire automatically if the refresh stops.
Product availability: reviewed when a price lookup stops resolving, which is our signal that a model may have been discontinued.
Standards references: reviewed when a standard is revised. ASTM F2413, for instance, has been revised several times, and our pages name the revision we are describing.
Content: reviewed when a reader reports an issue, a product changes, or the category moves.

Authorship

Every article on this site is written under a named byline, and the structured data on each page names the same person rather than a generic organization. There is no anonymous editorial collective. The author biography is on the about page.

Links to other sites

We link out to standards bodies, government agencies and clinical sources because our reasoning should be checkable. Those links are not affiliate links and we earn nothing from them. Commercial links are marked with a sponsored relationship attribute and disclosed, as the disclosure page explains.