Evidence rules

Proof before percentage.

PriceCrater uses strict labels so a dramatic-looking discount never outruns what the data can actually establish.

The record

Starting August 18, 2026, PriceCrater retains product-level events only when an accepted variant's price, compare-at value, stock state, or identity changes. Unchanged five-minute checks do not manufacture extra history points.

The source

Our monitor
A price PriceCrater recorded directly from the retailer's product catalog during a completed scan.
Retailer
A compare-at or reference price supplied by the retailer. It is never presented as a price PriceCrater previously observed.
Live check
A fresh validation of the exact linked product variant, current price, and availability before a public verified label.

Publication rules

  • Exact prices are primary; displayed percentages never round upward.
  • Public timestamps are absolute, not permanently stale phrases such as “12 minutes ago.”
  • Product images must come from the retailer's own archived source bytes, never an AI recreation.
  • An ended deal remains visible and is marked expired rather than silently deleted.
  • Affiliate commission never changes eligibility, ranking, or truth labels.

What enters search

PriceCrater does not index merchant-style product pages whose only useful elements are a title, retailer image, current price, and shopping link. Product and brand pages must make original PriceCrater evidence their visible primary purpose.

  • An evidence page requires at least two retained observations for the same product identity.
  • It must also contain a measured price or stock transition, or a compare-at divergence retained across at least three observations and seven days.
  • The page is bound to the exact retained-data export by SHA-256; typing a claim or counter into the page manifest cannot make it eligible.
  • Pages that do not clear that gate automatically receive noindex and are excluded from the sitemap.
  • Clearing the evidence gate is not enough by itself. Pages enter search in reviewed batches, beginning with a small number of useful brand pages.
  • Search Console results—not a page-count target—determine when the next batch is admitted.
  • Affiliate links are secondary, visibly disclosed, and marked as sponsored for search engines.

The generator enforces these rules before deployment and the approved release command publishes only its checked output. It cannot turn a page indexable merely because the retailer has a product feed or an affiliate program.

Detail-page indexing is currently locked. Only this methodology page and the homepage are admitted while the retained-data exporter and fixed evidence renderer are completed.

Limits

A product-catalog price cannot prove a coupon, membership, location-specific offer, shipping total, or checkout-only price. PriceCrater labels those conditions separately when they can be verified and otherwise makes no claim.