Editorial policy

The four rules everything follows

Every page on Character is produced under the same four rules: claims are traced to a primary source, numbers carry the date they were observed, commercial relationships never touch editorial judgement, and anything that turns out to be wrong is corrected in public. The rules are short because they have to survive contact with a subject that changes monthly.

Coverage of AI chat apps affects real decisions: whether to hand over a selfie for age assurance, whether to pay for a subscription, whether an app is appropriate for a household with teenagers in it. That is why the standard here is higher than a summary of what an app claims about itself.

Where information comes from

Sources are ranked, and the ranking decides which version of a disputed fact gets published.

• Company primary sources. Help centre articles, official announcements, in-app screens, and developer replies posted publicly under store reviews. These decide questions about policy and process, such as how the age check escalates from automatic assurance to a selfie to an identity document.
• Store listings and platform disclosures. App Store and Google Play pages supply version numbers, update dates, install counts, age labels, subscription prices, and the data-collection disclosures filed by the developer. Each of these is recorded with the date it was read, because all of them move.
• Direct observation. Accounts are created and used on the web app, iOS, and Android. Observation settles questions the documentation does not answer, such as whether a feature exists on one platform only.
• User reports. Store reviews and community forums show where experience diverges from documentation. They are reported as patterns and attributed as such, never presented as a company position.
• Regulatory and legal filings. Where an app's rules follow from a legal requirement, the requirement is cited rather than paraphrased at second hand.

Those rankings decide disputed facts in practice. Pricing on Character AI Plus comes from store listings, feature behavior on Character AI voice and Character AI bots comes from the creator documentation and direct testing, the sign-in history on Character AI login comes from dated help center articles, and the court record behind is Character AI safe comes from filings. Material from other review sites is not used as a source. If a fact cannot be traced to one of the categories above, it does not get published.

How claims get checked

Before a page goes live, every factual sentence is matched against its source. Prices are checked in the store where the price applies, since subscription pricing differs by market and currency. Version numbers and update dates are read from the listing, not from a changelog aggregator. Feature descriptions are confirmed on each platform separately.

Two categories get flagged rather than stated. The first is anything a reader cannot verify and we cannot test, such as what an identity verification provider does with a document after it is uploaded. The site reports what the company states about retention and labels it as the company's statement. The second is anything sourced from user reports, which is attributed to reviewers with the period they were posted.

Numbers that move fast, such as star ratings and review counts, are published as a snapshot with a date attached. A rating quoted without a date is a claim with a short and undisclosed shelf life.

Bylines and accountability

Pages carry no personal byline. Fabricated author profiles with invented degrees and invented years of experience are widespread in this category, and inventing one here would undermine the standard the rest of this page describes. What replaces the byline is a documented process and a working correspondence address.

The editorial address, [email protected], reaches the people responsible for what is published. Anyone quoting this site should cite the site and the date of the version they read, since pages are revised in place.

Corrections

Errors are inevitable in a subject where a company can change its access rules with a single announcement. What matters is what happens next.

• Report. Send the page, the exact sentence, and the source that contradicts it to [email protected].
• Check. The claim is verified against a primary source within 48 hours of the report arriving.
• Fix. Confirmed errors are corrected in the page itself, not in a comment or a follow-up.
• Disclose. Where the correction changes the meaning of a passage, a dated note records what changed. Minor fixes such as a revised price or version number are covered by the update date at the top of the page.
• Reply. Whoever reported the error is told what was found, including when the original text turns out to have been right.

Pages are not deleted to make an error disappear, and coverage is never withdrawn at the request of a company it describes. Every address in use, and what each one is for, is listed on the contact page.

Update schedule

Pages that carry store data, pricing, or version numbers are reviewed monthly. Pages describing policy, such as age assurance and moderation, are reviewed whenever the platform publishes an announcement that touches them, and otherwise every quarter. The date at the top of each page shows when it was last checked, not when it was first written.

Where a policy has changed since a previous version of a page, the old position is described alongside the new one rather than erased, because readers arriving from an outdated source need to see which claim they are carrying.

Separation from commercial arrangements

No app developer, advertiser, or affiliate network sees a page before publication or has any right of review over it. Commercial arrangements do not determine which apps get covered, what is said about them, or the order in which they appear. Where an app we may earn revenue from has a problem, that problem is reported in the same terms as any other.

The revenue model itself, including how affiliate links work and what they pay, is described in the affiliate disclosure. Background on the site and its scope is on the about page, and data practices are covered in the privacy policy.