How we verify owners
Owner reviews 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.
- Photos
- An owner signed in with their account can add up to four photos of their own unit to a review. They are public: they show with the review, on the product page and in the community. Readers can report a review whose photos break the rules, and a moderator can take it down.
- Verifying
- The owner sent a photo and a moderator has not looked at it yet.
- Photo-verified
- A moderator looked at the owner’s photos and they show the product on the page. A photo proves possession, not purchase, and not how the product was used.
How an owner review is checked before it appears
- Automatic checks: the owner review 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 does not rewrite an owner review; it accepts or declines it against those rules and gives the author a one-line reason.
- A person: a moderator steps in only when the automatic checks decline a review and the author appeals, when readers report one, or when a product gets a burst of anonymous reviews in a day. Otherwise owner reviews publish as soon as the automatic checks pass, signed in or not; adding photos needs a signed-in account.
- Afterwards: readers can report an owner review; a moderator can hide or remove it at any time, and the author can ask for a human look at a declined review.
Light proofreading, after publication: your owner review is public on SoundGuys, so once it is live we may run a light AI proofread for typos and spelling. It never changes what you said, your opinion or your scores. A proofread review says so on its own page, and you can undo the proofread with one tap, or edit or delete your review as always. We keep this out of the publication checks so publishing stays simple.
Ordering and fairness
Owner reviews are ordered photo-verified first, then newest. Nothing about how positive or negative an owner review 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 owner reviews follow you across devices and so we can tell you when one is published or declined; the email is never shown. A device token in a cookie identifies your owner reviews on this browser and is used for nothing else, including analytics.
Your public member page
Once you are signed in and have a published owner review, you have a public member page in the SoundGuys community: your owner name, the products you reviewed, your badges and your place on the leaderboard. It never shows your name, your email or anything you did not publish. You can hide it at any time in your Settings; your reviews then stay up under your owner name, without a link to a page, and you leave the leaderboard. Owners who have not signed in have no page.
Affiliate disclosure
SoundGuys may earn a commission on purchases made through retail links on product pages. Owner reviews are not paid for, are not solicited from specific owners, and are not rewritten by us: at most we proofread typos, which is shown on the review’s own page and which the author can undo.