How we verify owners

Owner notes are short, structured reports from readers who own a product: how long they have had it, whether they still use it, four quick reads against expectations, hours per charge, whether they would buy it again, and one sentence. They sit beside our own testing, never inside it.

What the labels mean

Owner-reported: The default. The reader says they own the product. We have not seen proof, and we say so. Nothing on SoundGuys means “verified purchase” — an affiliate click is not a purchase and we never see order data.
Verifying: The reader attached a photo of their unit and a moderator has not looked at it yet.
Photo-verified: A moderator looked at a photo of the reader’s unit and it matched the product on the page. A photo proves possession, not purchase, and not how the product was used. The photo is deleted once the decision is made; it is never published.

How a note is checked before it appears

Automatic checks: the note must be about lived experience with this product, with no promotion, links or codes, no personal data or names of private people, no abuse, and readable. These checks run in software, including an AI model hosted by a US sub-processor (Anthropic); the model never rewrites a note, it only accepts or declines it against those rules and gives the author a one-line reason.
A person: notes from readers who have not signed in wait for a moderator before publishing. Notes from signed-in readers publish as soon as the automatic checks pass.
Afterwards: readers can report a note; a moderator can hide or remove it at any time, and the author can ask for a human look at a declined note.

Ordering and fairness

Notes are ordered photo-verified first, then newest. Nothing about how positive or negative a note is affects whether it is shown or where it appears, and we monitor accept and decline rates by sentiment to keep it that way. Aggregate percentages appear only once twenty owners have written in; below that we show counts.

Pseudonyms and your data

Every author gets a generated pseudonym. Signing in links your email to it so your notes follow you across devices and so we can tell you when a note is published or declined; the email is never shown. A device token in a cookie identifies your notes on this browser and is used for nothing else, including analytics.

Affiliate disclosure

SoundGuys may earn a commission on purchases made through retail links on product pages. Owner notes are not paid for, are not solicited from specific owners, and are not edited by us.