Our Review Board
Draft — pending expert review · Updated
The board
We're recruiting our first reviewers.
No reviewer has joined yet, so no page on this site has been approved. Until a named reviewer approves a page, it stays out of search results and shows no reviewer's name. When reviewers join, this section lists each one with their credentials and affiliation, linked to a profile that shows the pages they have approved. If you hold one of the credentials below and would like to help, please contact us.
What reviewers do
A reviewer checks a page before it is allowed into search results, and puts their name on it. Nothing on this site is meant to rank until a named reviewer has approved it.
We hold pages to that standard because water testing is a health topic. Google's guidelines for its search quality raters describe health as a "Your Money or Your Life" topic: "YMYL topics can directly and significantly impact people's health, financial stability or safety, or the welfare or well-being of society." The same guidelines say trust is "the most important member of the E-E-A-T family." A page about what may be in your drinking water should be checked by a qualified person before you rely on it.
A reviewer approves one exact version of a page. They check the draft against the primary sources listed at the end of the page and against the benchmark values in our versioned data, then record a decision: approved, or changes requested. An approval covers only that version. If a word, a number or a source changes afterward, the page goes back out of search until a reviewer approves the new version. When decisions differ over time, the latest one counts.
The same approval applies to the plain-language explanations we show next to your lab results, so a change to an explanation also needs a new approval.
Once a page is approved, its byline shows the reviewer's name, their credentials and the date the page last changed. A page that no reviewer has approved shows no reviewer's name.
The credentials we look for, each with a public track record you can check:
- an environmental chemist or environmental engineer
- a current or former director of a certified drinking water lab
- a water specialist with a university extension program
Reviewers check facts, sources and how results are explained. They don't diagnose, give medical advice or recommend products. Questions about your health belong with a health professional.
Independence
A review looks at a page's sources, its data and how clearly it explains them. What we earn from lab orders plays no part in a review, and no lab, manufacturer or partner can pay to change a page, a test plan or the meaning of a result.
Reviewers don't choose or rank labs. The order in which labs appear comes from published routing rules, and what we earn from a lab and whether a lab is a partner are never inputs.
Each reviewer's profile lists their affiliation, so you can see where they work and judge their review with that in mind. A reviewer can request changes as well as approve, and a page they have not approved in its current version never carries their name.