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PERCH & POSTURE

Editorial policy

What can influence a ranking on this site, what cannot, and what happens when we get something wrong.

Last updated September 30, 2026

How picks are selected

Products are scored against a published rubric of six criteria, every one of which is computable from the manufacturer's own published documentation. Each criterion is scored relative to the best published figure in that page's field; the overall score is the mean, rounded to one decimal place. Nothing is hand-assigned.

The rank order on every page is whatever those scores produced. Award labels - "Best Overall", "Best for Petite Users", "Skip This" - describe what each product is best at; they do not override the ranking.

Products are excluded before scoring for the reasons listed in the methodology's disqualifiers section, and every exclusion is published with its reason on the page where the product would otherwise have appeared. An exclusion we will not explain is not an exclusion; it is a silence.

What cannot influence a ranking

Four numbers, and all of them are zero

Sponsored placements: 0. No brand can pay to appear on this site, to appear higher, or to have a competitor removed. There is no rate card, because there is nothing for sale.

Free products accepted: 0. We have accepted no product samples, review units, or loans from any manufacturer or retailer.

Products we sell: 0. We hold no inventory and operate no store. At least one competitor in this category discloses selling the products it ranks; we are not in a position to, and think that distinction is worth stating.

Commission rate influence: 0. Different products pay different commission rates. Where a cheaper option is better for the buyer it is the higher pick, including when it earns us less. Re-ranking is triggered by a specification change, a newly qualifying product, or a price move that changes cost per warranty year - never by a rate.

One relationship worth declaring explicitly rather than in a footnote. One brand in this category is a hands-on testing partner of ours, and nothing of theirs appears anywhere on this site. No picks, no comparison rows, no "also consider" mentions, no links. That stays true until we have actually tested their products - at which point they will be labeled as the only products here we have sat on, and that label will be per-product rather than a claim about the site.

It would be easier to include them and disclose it. Excluding them entirely is cleaner and costs us the commission, which is the point.

Sourcing standards

  • Every specification traces to the manufacturer's own published documentation, and the listing is linked on the page as the source. Not a retailer's summary, not a competitor's review, not our recollection.
  • Every anthropometric figure traces to one named published table, cited on every page that uses it. One module computes all of them, so the site cannot contradict itself.
  • Every standard is named. "BIFMA certified" is not a standard; ANSI/BIFMA X5.1 and X5.11 are, and they test differently. Where a manufacturer does not name the protocol, we say so.
  • Every price comes from a live lookup, carries its verification date, and expires after 48 hours. Where there is no live price the reader sees "check price", never a remembered number.
  • No borrowed authority. No "experts agree", no "studies show" without a named study, no implied review panel, no invented credentials.
  • Where a figure is not published, we print that. Filling a gap with an estimate is the single thing this site exists not to do.

Reviews, ratings and the things we will not fabricate

There are no testimonials on this site and there is no rating for Perch & Postureitself. The brand launched in 2026 and has no customer base. A clean page with no testimonials is the correct state; a page with invented ones would be the fastest way to deserve nothing, and it is not a line we will approach.

We also do not quote another business's customer reviews as though they were ours, aggregate third-party ratings into a score of our own, or present product review counts we have not verified.

The visible score on a pick is never emitted as structured data. No review markup, no rating markup, anywhere. We do not run a testing lab, so marking an editorial score up as a product rating would contradict the first paragraph of every page it appeared on. The practical consequence is that search consoles report these pages as missing review fields, permanently. That is the correct state and we are not going to fix it by inventing data.

Medical boundary

There is no clinician on this site and nothing here is medically reviewed. A significant share of seating search traffic comes from people in pain, which makes this the easiest place on the site to be commercially rewarded for overstating.

So the rule is fixed: pages about back pain, sciatica and knee pressure describe what a seat does mechanically - where it puts your pelvis, how it distributes load across the seat pan, what the published angles are - and stop there. No diagnosis, no promised relief, no implied clinical review.

Where a product listing carries "doctor recommended" or similar, that is a marketing phrase rather than a credential and we do not repeat it as a specification. And every page in that space carries the same line: persistent or worsening pain, numbness, tingling or weakness is a reason to see a clinician, not to change chairs.

Update cadence

  • Prices: daily. Automated, against the retailer. Anything older than 48 hours stops displaying on its own.
  • Availability: with each price run. A product that stops being purchasable has its buy control disabled rather than left linking to a dead page.
  • Specifications and rankings: reviewed when triggered. A specification change, a discontinued pick, a newly qualifying product, or a price move that changes cost per warranty year. Not on a calendar, because a page that has not changed does not need a new date on it.
  • Discontinued picks are handled immediately, not at the next review: the buy control is disabled, the successor is researched from its own published listing, and the pick is rewritten rather than having the old specs carried across.
  • The "last updated" date reflects a real content change. It is not a build timestamp, and re-deploying the site does not move it.

Corrections

A site whose entire claim is "check our arithmetic" does not get to be precious about being checked. So:

  1. Tell us and we will check it against the source. Not against our memory of the source.
  2. If it is wrong, we fix it and date the correction visibly on the page. Not a silent edit.
  3. If a correction changes a score, we re-rank and say that the order changed. A rubric that produces a different answer with better inputs is working.
  4. If we cannot verify either way, we say that too and mark the figure unverified rather than leaving it standing.

The contact form has a correction option, or email info@perchandposture.com.

Who writes and who reviews

Every page on this site is written by Sawyer V., framed as what he is - someone genuinely interested in the category who reads the manuals and does the arithmetic. No credential is claimed, no tenure is implied, and no editorial board or expert panel exists.

If a byline on this site ever names anyone else, or claims a qualification, treat it as an error and tell us.