Editorial Policy

Version: 1.0 Effective: May 25, 2026 Next review: May 25, 2027 (or sooner on material change) Public comment window for amendments: 30 days

This is the formal commitment that governs how The Touchstone Report selects, sources, scores, and publishes. Every editorial decision is traceable to this document or to the scoring methodology. Amendments require a 30-day public comment period before adoption. Material amendments are announced on the homepage.

1. Editorial independence

The Touchstone Report editorial team operates independently of any rated entity's sales, marketing, or leadership teams. Story selection, scoring, and publication decisions are made by the editorial team alone.

The publication is funded by Heirfolio, Inc. Heirfolio's leadership, including CEO Michael Tanguma, has no editorial role. Specifically:

Heirfolio's leadership does not see entity scores, comparison drafts, reports, or methodology changes prior to publication, except where Heirfolio itself is the subject of a piece and the standard 30-day pre-publication fact-check applies equally to Heirfolio as to any other rated entity.
Heirfolio's leadership cannot direct, suggest, veto, or modify editorial decisions about any entity in our index, including Heirfolio's own competitors.
Heirfolio's leadership cannot direct the choice of which entities to score, which categories to add, or which reports to commission.
Any attempt by the funder's leadership to influence editorial decisions outside the formal fact-check process is logged and disclosed in the affected entity's profile.

The editorial board is responsible for enforcing the firewall. Editorial board composition requires at least two members independent of any rated entity at all times. Editorial board members are required to disclose any prior employment, equity holdings, or advisory relationships with any entity in or adjacent to the index; conflicts trigger recusal from the specific decision.

2. Conflict-of-interest policy

Personal conflicts

Every editor, writer, and editorial-board member maintains a current conflicts disclosure on file. Disclosures include:

Current employment outside The Touchstone Report
Prior employment with any entity in or adjacent to the index, going back five years
Equity holdings in any entity in or adjacent to the index, regardless of size
Family members employed by or holding equity in any entity in or adjacent to the index
Paid consulting or advisory relationships with any entity in or adjacent to the index, going back five years
Acceptance of gifts, travel, or hospitality from any entity in the index above $50 retail value in the prior 24 months

A conflict triggers recusal from the specific entity's coverage. Recused team members cannot edit, write, score, or fact-check the affected entity. Recusals are noted in the byline of the affected piece (e.g., "This profile was prepared without editor X, who is recused under our conflict-of-interest policy.").

Publication-level conflicts

The Touchstone Report's funding relationship with Heirfolio is the largest publication-level conflict in the operation. It is disclosed:

On every page that contains an affiliate link to Heirfolio
On the affiliate disclosure page
On the about page
On the Heirfolio entity profile
On every comparison page that includes Heirfolio

If the publication adds, modifies, or terminates any commercial relationship with a rated entity, the change is reflected on the affiliate disclosure page within seven days.

Gifts and hospitality

Editorial staff do not accept gifts, paid travel, or hospitality from rated entities above $50 retail value. Working meals at trade events do not count as hospitality. Promotional samples (a free kit, a trial subscription, a sample product) accepted for the purpose of testing are permitted, are returned where return is practical, and are disclosed in the test section of the affected entity profile.

3. Correction policy

The Touchstone Report publishes corrections within seven days of verified factual error. The process:

A reader or third party reports a suspected error to corrections@touchstonereport.com with the URL, the specific claim, and a link to the corrected source.
The responsible editor verifies the claim against the source provided and against any additional sourcing required.
Where the claim is verified, the page is updated. The original incorrect text is preserved with a strikethrough; the correction is inserted with a [corrected DATE] marker; a correction note is appended at the bottom of the page describing what was changed and why.
Where the corrected fact materially affects a dimension score (changes the dimension by more than one point), the dimension is re-scored. The new total is computed using the published methodology and published with a correction note. The previous score is archived under the version label v1.0-pre-correction-DATE.
Corrections that change a score by more than five points are also noted on the homepage for seven days.
Where the reported claim is not verified, we respond to the reporter with the basis for our decision and do not modify the page.

Corrections are not silently amended. Every correction has a visible mark on the page.

The corrections archive is published at /about/corrections and is searchable.

4. Source policy

Every material factual claim in The Touchstone Report is sourced. Sourcing standards differ by claim type:

Trust-stack claims (BBB rating, Trustpilot count, years operating, press coverage)

Sourced to the primary record. BBB ratings are cited to the entity's BBB.org profile URL. Trustpilot counts are cited to the entity's Trustpilot profile URL. Years operating are sourced to WHOIS records and the entity's About page (where both agree) or to the older of the two where they disagree, with the discrepancy noted. Press coverage is sourced to the specific article URL, not to a press-page aggregation maintained by the entity.

Pricing and policy claims

Sourced to the entity's own published page (pricing page, terms, FAQ) at the URL on the date verified. Where pricing or policy changes between the date of verification and the next quarterly review, the change is logged and the score is re-evaluated at the next review.

Performance claims (payout, support response time, process speed)

Sourced to our own live testing. The test methodology — kit requested on date X, item Y shipped via Z, response received on date W from sender V — is described in the entity profile in sufficient detail that the test could be replicated. We do not source performance claims to entity self-reports.

Opinion claims

Opinion is permitted in The Touchstone Report. Opinion is identified as such (typically by sentence construction — "we judge…", "we award…", "by our reading…"). Opinion is bounded by the published methodology and the evidence on the page.

Sources we do not accept as primary

Anonymous Reddit posts about a specific company, used as the basis for a scoring claim. Reddit aggregate sentiment is occasionally referenced descriptively ("reviews cluster in the 4.0–4.5 band on third-party platforms"), but no single anonymous post supports a dimension score change.
Press releases from the entity itself, used as the basis for trust-stack claims. Press releases on PRNewswire are evidence the release was distributed, not evidence the underlying claim is verified.
Self-published claims on the entity's About page used as the sole basis for trust-stack scoring. Where an entity claims "$100M transacted" or "650,000 customers," we note the claim is self-published, weigh it against tenure and corroborating signals, and score conservatively where the claim is not externally verifiable.

5. Anonymous source policy

Anonymous sources are rarely used. Their use requires editor-in-chief sign-off and a written record of:

The source's relationship to the matter at hand
Why the source cannot be on the record
What corroboration exists from non-anonymous sources
The specific claim the anonymous source is supporting

No anonymous source is used as the sole basis for a material claim. Where an anonymous tip is the originating signal, the published claim must be independently verifiable from non-anonymous sourcing. The published piece states that anonymous sourcing was used and describes (without identifying the source) the relationship to the matter.

We do not pay sources.

6. Pre-publication fact-check policy

Every entity profile, comparison page, and report receives the same pre-publication treatment.

30-day notice to rated entities

Thirty days before publication of a new entity profile, a re-scored profile with a score change of more than five points, or a comparison page that includes the entity, we send the draft scorecard to the entity's leadership for response. The draft includes:

The total score and the band
Each dimension's raw score and the sub-criteria evaluated
The specific evidence cited for each sub-criterion
The intended publication date

What the entity can do with the draft

The entity can:

Correct factual errors. Verified corrections update the published piece, including updating dimension scores where warranted.
Provide a written response of up to 500 words. The response is published verbatim alongside the score in a "Company response" section. Edits to the company response are limited to obvious typo correction.
Provide additional context, source materials, or documentation. We evaluate the new evidence against the methodology and update the piece where warranted.

The entity cannot:

Veto publication
Change scores other than through the evidence-based correction process
Edit non-quoted parts of the piece
Require pre-publication review of the editor's final commentary or framing

Publication after fact-check

The piece publishes on the announced date with any corrections applied and with the company's response published verbatim. Where the entity did not respond within the 30-day window, the piece publishes with a note: "The entity received the draft on DATE; no response was received as of publication. Any response received post-publication will be added to this section."

7. Methodology change policy

The scoring methodology is the rubric every score is computed against. Changes to the methodology follow this process:

The proposed change is published on the methodology page with a proposed label, the proposed effective date, and the rationale.
A 30-day public comment period opens. Comments are submitted to methodology@touchstonereport.com. Substantive comments are summarized in the published methodology change log.
At the end of the comment period, the editorial board adopts, modifies, or rejects the proposed change. The decision and the reasoning are published in the methodology change log.
On adoption, the new version is assigned (v1.1, v1.2, etc.) and every entity in the index is re-scored against the new version.
Previous-version scores are archived under their version label (e.g., v1.0 score: 89; v1.1 score: 92). The most recent score is the headline number on the entity profile.

We do not retroactively re-score entities under archived methodology versions. The archive exists so readers can audit the change.

8. Sponsorship and advertising

The Touchstone Report does not run display advertising. The publication does not accept sponsored content, paid placements, or pay-for-review arrangements with any entity in or adjacent to the index.

The Touchstone Report does accept affiliate referral fees from a limited number of entities, currently only Heirfolio, where the relationship is disclosed on every page that contains an affiliate link and listed in full at /about/affiliates. The affiliate model is operated under the methodology-mandated constraint that the affiliate relationship has zero influence on the score. Score changes do not affect the affiliate relationship; the affiliate relationship does not affect score changes.

The Touchstone Report Weekly newsletter is supported by reader subscriptions when paid tiers launch (target: Q3 2026). Until paid tiers launch, the newsletter is supported by the same funding source as the publication and the same firewall applies.

9. Republishing and citation

Articles, scores, and methodology pages on The Touchstone Report may be cited freely with attribution and a link to the source page. Republication of full pieces requires written permission from editorial@touchstonereport.com.

The public score API at /api/score/[slug] is open. Other industry publications, comparison sites, and entity sites may embed Touchstone Report scores using the API; the only condition is attribution to The Touchstone Report on the page where the score appears.

10. Accountability

The Touchstone Report is accountable to its readers. We publish:

The methodology our scores are derived from
The dimension-by-dimension math for every score
The conflicts of every editor on every piece they touch
Corrections within seven days of verification
Methodology changes after a 30-day public comment period
The full list of affiliate relationships, updated within seven days of change

We are not accountable to the entities we score in any of the following ways: we do not let entities pre-approve scores, we do not modify scores to retain affiliate relationships, we do not retract critical findings under legal pressure where the findings are supported by the published evidence, and we do not source our work to PR materials produced by the rated entities.

Subject to the next quarterly review.

Change log

Version	Date	Change
1.0	2026-05-25	Initial editorial policy published

Comments and questions on this policy: editorial@touchstonereport.com. Suggested amendments: methodology@touchstonereport.com.