AI use policy

Where AI is used

AI tools help draft and restructure text, write and review the site’s code, suggest questions a page should answer, and check pages for accessibility problems. Much of the text on this site began as an AI-assisted draft. We say so plainly because readers are entitled to know how a page was produced.

Where it is not trusted

AI output is never cited as a source and is never the reason a claim is on the page. Every factual statement has to trace to a named source listed on that page — a federal agency, a standards body, or a manufacturer’s own documentation — and that source has to have been opened and read. When a source cannot be retrieved and confirmed, the claim it would have supported is removed rather than kept on trust.

What that has caught

Checking drafts against their sources regularly removes claims that sounded standard but are not in the source. Examples from this site’s own review: a statement that the 2026 dependent care FSA increase was the first since 1986 (the limit was temporarily raised to $10,500 for 2021); the FCC’s SIM-swap rules described as requiring carriers to lock accounts, which the FCC’s announcement does not say; and advice attributed to the FCC about pressing a button during a robocall, which the cited FCC page does not contain. None of these was published.

What is checked mechanically

Before every release, each calculator’s worked examples run as automated tests, each page is rendered on desktop and mobile, and each cited link is checked. Figures that come from arithmetic are recomputed, not copied; where a source states a number that does not match its own arithmetic, the page uses the arithmetic and says so.

Images

Illustrations and page cards are generated or drawn for the site. None of them shows a real product test, and none is presented as a photograph of one.

Who is responsible

Responsibility for every page, including its mistakes, sits with the publisher. Nothing is published because a tool produced it, and a page is corrected the same way whether the error came from a person or a model. See the editorial policy and the corrections log.