Editorial Standards: How We Rank, Review, and Recommend

Last updated 21 May 2026 · Applies to every page on proteinprice.com

ProteinPrice exists for one reason: to compute, in public, which protein products give you the most grams of protein per dollar at any given moment. Every ranking, every "best value" badge, every comparison table you see on this site is generated by a formula that does not know which brand is paying us, which retailer is favoured, or which product we personally happen to like. This page is a complete account of how that works, where the lines are, and how to push back when we get something wrong.

Our independence

ProteinPrice is structurally independent of every supplement brand we cover. We are not a brand-owned media property. We are not a subsidiary of a holding company that also owns supplement labels. Nobody behind the site is on a brand payroll, retainer, or consulting contract with any of the 64 brands ranked across the catalog.

What independence looks like in day-to-day practice:

• No brand reviews our drafts before publication. No PR team gets advance notice when a price changes their ranking.
• No brand has approval or veto power over the products we add, retire, or reclassify.
• No editorial calendar is shaped by brand pitches. We cover what readers ask about and what the math surfaces.
• We accept free samples for hands-on evaluation only when we ask for them, and that fact does not factor into the Value Score. Free product cannot buy a ranking position because the ranking position comes from a formula that does not have a "free product" input.
• We say no to "exclusive launch" content, embargoed first-looks tied to favourable coverage, and any other arrangement that trades editorial control for access.

How affiliate links work (and why they don't affect rankings)

ProteinPrice is free to read, free to use, and free to query through our public JSON feeds at /data/. We pay for the servers, the scraping infrastructure, and the time to maintain it through affiliate commissions on outbound clicks. When you press a "View Deal" button and complete a purchase at a participating retailer, the retailer pays us a small commission. Your checkout price is identical to what you would pay arriving any other way.

The architecture matters, so here it is in detail:

1. The scoring engine is upstream of the affiliate layer. Rankings, Value Scores, "best of" lists, and category sorts are produced by a function whose only inputs are scraped retailer prices, protein content per serving, and servings per container. The function has no parameter named "commission rate." It cannot see who pays us what.
2. Retailers without an affiliate program are ranked exactly the same way. If Costco posts the lowest verified price on a given SKU, Costco wins the "Best Price" slot on that product page even though we do not earn anything on a Costco click. Walmart in some categories falls in the same bucket. The scoring engine is indifferent.
3. Affiliate decoration happens after the ranking. Once the formula has decided who is #1, our build step adds the appropriate affiliate parameters to the outbound URL for retailers we partner with. If we drop a retailer from our affiliate roster tomorrow, the rankings on tomorrow's site would be identical to today's.

The retailers we currently have active affiliate relationships with: Amazon, iHerb, Bodybuilding.com, MyProtein, Transparent Labs, Muscle & Strength, GNC, and Vitacost. The full plain-English breakdown of what we earn and how it works lives at /affiliate-disclosure/.

Value Score methodology, in full

The Value Score is the single number that drives every "best value" badge, every category ranking, and every comparison sort on the site. It is published on every product page so readers can verify the math themselves.

Worked example: a $29.99 tub with 20 servings at 20g protein scores (20 × 20) ÷ 29.99 = 13.3 g/$. A $54.99 tub with 74 servings at 24g protein scores (24 × 74) ÷ 54.99 = 32.3 g/$. The larger tub is more than twice the value despite the higher sticker price. That delta is the entire reason this site exists: sticker price hides the real economics of grams in your kitchen versus dollars in your bank account.

Key methodology choices

• Best current price means lowest verified price. "Verified" means the value passed our sanity range ($5 to $500), our 50% swing-rejection rule, and our cross-retailer outlier check (any single retailer more than 30% from the median is rejected). A glitched $9.99 scrape does not win the #1 slot.
• One protein, one tub, one comparable unit. We do not blend bundles, multi-packs, and singles into one score. A 5-lb tub competes against a 5-lb tub. A bar is compared against bars, not powders.
• Subscriptions and coupons are excluded by default. We score the price a one-time buyer pays. If a retailer offers a meaningful subscribe-and-save discount, that is noted on the product page, but it does not displace the one-time price in the score.
• Rankings recompute every scrape cycle. Prices move. The catalog moves with them. A product that is #4 in the morning may be #1 by afternoon if a retailer drops the price. We publish what the math says, not a static editor's choice.
• Ties are broken by recency of verification. If two products score identically, the one whose price was verified more recently appears first. Older confirmations rank below newer ones.

Full derivations, edge cases, and how we handle bundle pricing, subscription pricing, and multi-flavour SKUs are documented at /how-it-works/.

How products get added to the catalog

Reader requests and our own scope reviews drive what enters the catalog. Brands cannot pay to be listed. Adding a product is a manual gate followed by automated tracking:

1. Scope check. The product has to fit one of our covered protein categories (whey, casein, plant, clear whey, collagen, mass gainer, protein bars, RTD drinks, plant bars, meal-replacement bars, etc.). Creatine, pre-workout, fat burners, multivitamins, and anything outside protein are out of scope and stay out.
2. Spec verification by a human. A person on our side reads the brand's official product page and the supplement facts panel, then records protein per serving, servings per container, calories per serving, ingredients, and flavour lineup. We do not accept brand-submitted spreadsheets at face value.
3. Retailer URL mapping. The same person identifies the canonical retailer product pages where the SKU is sold and adds them to the scraper config. We try to cover at least three retailers per SKU at launch so the cross-retailer outlier check has data to work with.
4. First scrape and sanity review. The automated scrapers run, the Value Score is computed, and a human reviews the first ranking for obvious data errors before the product goes live on the public catalog.
5. Ongoing tracking. From that point, the SKU is rescraped on every cycle alongside everything else. New flavour SKUs from the same brand and product line are added as we notice them or as readers report them.

If a product you expected to find is missing, the most likely reasons are: it is out of scope (not protein), the spec data is not yet verified, or a retailer URL has not been mapped. Reader requests via /contact/ are the fastest way to push something up the queue.

How reviews and price data are sourced

Every price you see on the catalog comes from a live retailer page that our scrapers visited within the last 48 hours. Brands do not submit prices to us. We do not "syndicate" pricing from a third-party feed that brands also have access to.

• Live scraping of retailer product pages is the primary source. Our scrapers identify themselves in their User-Agent and respect robots.txt where required. Where retailers publish structured product data (schema.org Product / JSON-LD), we read that preferentially because it is more accurate and less likely to break on layout changes.
• Brand official websites are referenced only for the non-pricing spec fields (protein per serving, servings per container, ingredient highlights). We re-verify these whenever a brand reformulates or relaunches a SKU.
• Reader and editorial feedback is the source for category coverage decisions, comparison topics, and "best of" niche pages. We track which queries lead to dead ends and prioritise filling them.
• Hands-on impressions, where included in long-form brand reviews at /reviews/, are based on samples we either bought ourselves or requested from the brand for evaluation. Whether a sample was free or paid for is not an input to the Value Score and never will be.

Editorial mistakes and corrections policy

We get things wrong. A scraper mis-parses a bundle as a single. A new SKU lands in the wrong sub-category. A protein-per-serving figure was 24g and we transcribed it as 25g. The list goes on. The only honest response is a corrections policy with teeth:

• Public corrections, in place. When we discover an error on a long-form article, recipe, review, or guide that materially affected a recommendation, we add a dated "Correction" note at the top or bottom of the affected page rather than silently editing the original copy.
• Append-only price history. Every accepted price change is logged to price_history-YYYY-MM.jsonl at /data/. The file is never rewritten. If we ever quote a historical price, you can audit what we actually published, when.
• No silent re-ranking. Rankings recompute automatically as prices move, and that is fine, but if we ever change the ranking formula itself, the change is documented at /how-it-works/ with a version note rather than rolled out behind the scenes.
• Fast turnaround on reader-reported issues. Email [email protected] with the product URL or slug. We aim to acknowledge within one business day and resolve within five.
• Removal over publishing a number we do not trust. If a price looks wrong and the safeguards have not yet caught it, we would rather remove the listing temporarily than publish a number we cannot vouch for. "No price" is a safer answer than "wrong price."

Conflict of interest disclosure

Some conflicts of interest are obvious and disclosed everywhere on the site. Others are subtler. We try to surface both honestly:

• Affiliate commissions: we earn variable per-click or per-sale commissions from Amazon, iHerb, Bodybuilding.com, MyProtein, Transparent Labs, Muscle & Strength, GNC, and Vitacost. Commission rates differ. None of those rates enter the Value Score. See /affiliate-disclosure/ for the full breakdown.
• Brand relationships: nobody behind ProteinPrice holds a paid role with any of the 64 brands ranked on the site. If that ever changes, the affected brand will be flagged in a disclosure note on the relevant pages and that person will recuse themselves from coverage decisions involving the brand in question.
• Sample policy: we sometimes request samples for hands-on evaluation. Whether a sample was sent free or purchased at retail does not feed into the Value Score, which is computed entirely from retailer scrape data and label specs.
• Gifts, trips, and events: we do not accept paid trips, sponsored events, or "creator partnership" arrangements that come with content expectations. If we attend an industry event, we cover our own travel.
• Investments: nobody behind ProteinPrice holds equity in any of the supplement brands ranked on the site. If that ever changes, the position will be disclosed publicly here and on the affected coverage.

Feedback, complaints, and contact

Editorial corrections, complaints about coverage, or questions about how a ranking was generated all go to one place. Please include the product URL or slug if the issue is product-specific.

• Editorial questions and corrections: [email protected]
• General contact: [email protected] or /contact/
• Press inquiries: /press/
• Methodology details: /how-it-works/ and /how-we-test/

Everything on this page is binding on us. If you think we are violating any of it, write in. We would rather hear about it than not.