Research policy
Methodology
How evidence becomes published gift brand/shop research.
Independence and accountability
Gifting Index separates imported opportunity evidence from reviewed editorial claims and publishes no vendor facts without verification.
Research is published under the Gifting Index publication name rather than personal bylines. Accountability is attached to the publication through this public methodology, source citations, source-check dates, visible limitations, and substantive update dates.
Inclusion is not endorsement. A vendor’s position in a directory or article is not a score unless that page explicitly defines a scoring method.
Research process
Every comparison follows the same seven-step workflow so readers and retrieval systems can trace how the answer was produced.
Prioritize
Rank opportunities by observed citation frequency.
Use the imported opportunity-seeds.json as a queue, not as publishable content.
Source hierarchy
Product capabilities are established with the most direct first-party evidence available. Lower-level sources add context but do not silently replace stronger evidence.
| Level | Source type | How it is used |
|---|---|---|
| Primary | Official brand or service source | Verify current product, availability, pricing, and delivery claims. |
How claims are labeled
The label describes what the available evidence can support. It prevents a vendor statement, a connector exception, or a missing answer from being presented as a universal fact.
- Unreviewed
- Imported evidence only; not eligible for publication.
- Verified
- Checked against current supporting sources.
Comparison rules
Vendors in the same article are compared against the same declared dimensions. Conclusions must remain proportional to the cited evidence.
- Occasion and recipient fit
- Budget
- Availability and delivery
Terminology may be normalized to make equivalent concepts comparable, but vendor-specific distinctions are retained when they change the result. Strengths and constraints use the same evidence standard. Rankings and favorable conclusions are not sold.
What this research cannot verify
Public-source research has boundaries. The publication states those boundaries instead of converting uncertainty into certainty.
- The initial configuration contains no published articles or vendor profiles.
- Observed citation frequency is not a quality judgment.
Updates and corrections
- Recheck
- Recheck current availability, pricing, and delivery information before publishing or updating.
Machine-readable access
The same publication can be discovered through stable, open formats. These artifacts help search engines, LLM retrieval systems, and agents find canonical pages without relying on client-side rendering.
- RSS
- Published research feed.
Article pages also expose descriptive metadata and structured data in the static HTML. Machine-readable markup summarizes the visible page; it does not introduce claims that readers cannot see.
Methodology questions
What is the initial gifting coverage?
The initial opportunity clusters are gourmet gifts, subscription boxes, personalized gifts, delivery, corporate gifting, flowers, jewelry, and chocolate.