Editorial Standards

Four principles

1. Show the range, not a number. Salary data is genuinely uncertain. Publishing a single confident figure would be easier to read and less honest, so every pay figure here is a band with its sources attached.
2. Separate fact from judgement. Statistics are cited to a primary source. Opinions are written as opinions, with the reasoning visible so you can disagree with the argument rather than the conclusion.
3. Say what we do not know. Several topics on this site — the exact size of the AI click decline, which skills will matter in three years — do not have reliable answers yet. Pages that touch them say so.
4. Commercial arrangements never move a recommendation. No paid placement, no sponsored advice, no exceptions. Details on the disclosure page.

How claims are sourced

Every substantive claim falls into one of three categories, and each is handled differently.

Where sources disagree — which, for SEO salary data, is most of the time — we show the disagreement rather than picking the number that reads best.

The publishing process

1. Research. Primary documentation first: Google Search Central, schema.org, the quality rater guidelines, BLS occupational data. Commercial trackers and job-advertisement ranges second, read in plurality rather than singly.
2. Drafting. Written by a practising SEO professional. Structure is decided by what the reader needs to decide, not by a keyword outline.
3. Verification. Every figure is checked against its source before publication, and the source is linked so you can check it too.
4. Review. Pages are reviewed against their sources on a rolling basis. Salary and market data ages fastest and is prioritised.

Our policy on AI tooling

Being explicit about this matters more than it used to, and vagueness here would be hypocritical on a site that writes about AI search.

• AI tools are used in production of this site — for drafting assistance, structuring, and generating the site's build system.
• Every factual claim and every figure is verified against a primary source by a human before publication. That is the line that matters, and it is not negotiable.
• Judgements and recommendations are ours, based on working experience in the field, not synthesised from what other pages say.
• No content is published unread.

The reason to state this openly is simple: a site that told you AI-generated content without human verification is a quality problem, while quietly doing exactly that, would not deserve your trust on anything else.

Photography and licensing

Every page on this site carries its own photograph, and no image is used twice. Three things follow from that, and they are worth stating because image provenance is an area where publishers are routinely vague.

• Photographs are licensed stock, not evidence. They illustrate the subject; they are never presented as a screenshot, a chart or a document. Anything that carries data on this site is a table you can read, not a picture of one.
• Every image is credited in its caption, with a link to the photographer and to the original. Photography comes from Pexels under the Pexels licence, which permits commercial use without attribution — the credits are there because attribution is right, not because it is required.
• Alt text describes the photograph. It is written to tell a screen reader what is in the frame and how it relates to the page, not to repeat the target keyword. Alt text that exists for search engines rather than for readers is a small dishonesty, and a very common one.

Corrections

We will get things wrong. Salary data moves, job boards close, certifications change their terms, and a figure that was accurate at publication drifts.

Report anything wrong to [email protected]. Factual errors are corrected promptly. Where a correction materially changes a conclusion, it is noted on the page rather than made silently.

We do not re-date pages that have not substantively changed. A 'last updated' stamp on unmodified content is a small dishonesty and a common one.

Editorial independence

This site is funded by affiliate links on some outbound references to software and courses. Three rules keep that separate from what gets published:

• Recommendations are decided on merit before any commercial arrangement is considered. Where the right answer has no affiliate programme, it is still the answer.
• No company can pay to appear, to rank higher, or to be described more favourably. Offers to do so are declined.
• Negative conclusions are published as negative conclusions. The certification ROI calculator exists specifically to tell people when not to buy something.

Full detail on the advertising and affiliate disclosure page.

What we cannot claim

Three honest limits worth stating plainly:

• We do not own proprietary salary data. Everything here is compiled from public sources. Anyone claiming a private dataset for SEO salaries should be asked how it was collected.
• One editorial perspective is a constraint. Market observations are informed by experience in specific markets and may generalise imperfectly to yours.
• Career advice is not a prediction. Nothing here guarantees an outcome, and any guide that implies otherwise is selling something.