Editorial policy

This page describes how a gift guide on Arigato is put together. It is written so that a reader can check whether we followed it.

How a product earns a place

Every guide starts from an occasion and a reader, not from a list of products. We work out what someone in that situation is actually trying to solve — a wedding guest with a $100 budget and no idea what the couple needs, a friend buying for a second baby, someone whose parents are downsizing — and then look for the gifts that answer it.

A product has to clear all four of these to appear:

• It is available. Sold right now, in Australia, from a shop that ships here. A brilliant recommendation nobody can buy is not a recommendation.
• It survives the year. Gifts that are used once and stored forever do not make these lists, however well they photograph.
• The reviews hold up at volume. A high rating from forty reviews tells us very little. We look for sustained ratings across a large number of them, and we read the negative ones, because that is where the real caveat usually is.
• It suits being given. Sizes, colours and personal taste are risks a giver carries. A gift that only works if you guessed a preference correctly gets ranked below one that does not.

What every entry has to admit

Each pick carries a "worth knowing" note. That is not a formality: a guide where nothing has a downside is a guide nobody should trust, and it is usually a sign the writer never looked past the marketing copy. If a product is loud, bulky, awkward to clean, expensive to run or only worth it above a certain budget, it says so.

What money can and cannot buy

No shop, brand or agency can pay for a place in a guide, for a higher position within one, or for a caveat to be removed. We do not accept sponsored posts, paid placements or gifted products in exchange for coverage. Nobody outside Arigato sees a guide before it is published.

Our links do earn commission from some shops, and that creates a real incentive we manage rather than pretend away. Two rules exist because of it. First, the ranking is decided before anyone looks at which shop stocks the item. Second, when the right answer is a product from a shop that pays us nothing, it still goes in, still at the position it earned — and there are picks in these guides that earn us nothing at all.

Prices and how current they are

Prices come from the shop and go out of date quickly. We show a price only while the figure we hold is less than a day old; past that the card says to check the current price instead of showing a stale number next to a buy button. Prices, availability and specifications are always the shop's, and are correct only at the moment you look at them.

Ratings

Star ratings shown on a pick are the shop's own customer ratings, and they are labelled as such. They are not our score, we did not collect them, and we deliberately do not publish them as structured data that would imply we did.

Whether any of this is written by AI

Guides are written and edited by people, with software used for the mechanical parts — finding a product's current listing, image and price at the shop, and checking links still resolve. No guide is published without a person having decided what belongs in it and why. We say this because the question is now a reasonable one to ask of any list of product recommendations, including ours.

Updating and retiring guides

When a product is discontinued or replaced, we swap it and note the change. When a guide can no longer be kept accurate, we would rather remove it than leave it collecting search traffic. The "Checked" date on an article moves only when someone has re-examined the picks — never as a side effect of a deploy or a typo fix.