Editorial Policy
Last updated: June 2026
This page explains how we research, publish, review, and update credit card content on WhichWise. If anything here does not match what you experience on the site, email us at hello@whichwise.com. We want to hear about it.
Technical companion: for the full verification process (source cache, truth labels, tier gates, and the reward engine), see How We Verify Credit Card Data.
Primary sources
Every card page on WhichWise is built from the following sources, in order of authority:
- The official card page on the issuer's website (HDFC, SBI, ICICI, Axis, Amex, etc.).
- The card's MITC (Most Important Terms and Conditions) document, the legally-binding fine print issuers must publish.
- RBI circulars: for industry-wide changes (interchange caps, MDR rules, billing cycle regulations).
- Issuer press releases: for launches, devaluations, and benefit changes.
- Direct correspondence with bank customer service, when public documents are ambiguous.
We do not source primary facts from user reviews, social media, or aggregator sites. Those are useful for flagging that something may have changed, but the claim always gets verified against a primary source before we update a card page.
How we structure card data
Each card is stored as structured JSON with fields for annual fee, reward rate, category rules, partner rules, monthly caps, excluded categories, forex markup, lounge access, welcome bonus, eligibility, and more. This structure is what powers our comparison tables and reward breakdowns. Because the data is structured, it can be audited, compared, and kept consistent across the entire database.
Quality bar: 80+ score
Before a card page goes live, it is reviewed against a 14-dimension scoring rubric covering data accuracy, reward math, excluded categories, cap handling, lounge access details, eligibility, welcome bonus, milestones, fees, fee waiver, partner rates, insurance, forex, and presentation quality. Each dimension is scored 1–10, weighted, and summed.
A card page must score 80/100 or higher to publish. Pages below 80 go back into the review-and-fix cycle until they clear the bar. This rubric is our quality floor. It is not a subjective editorial verdict about the card itself.
Review cadence
- On launch: every card is reviewed before publication.
- On an ongoing basis: we re-verify enriched cards over time against the issuer's current terms, prioritising cards more likely to have changed. We don't commit to a fixed per-card schedule, and some cards go longer between checks than others.
- On devaluation alerts: when a user, a public source, or our own monitoring flags a change, we aim to re-verify promptly and update the page with a “recent changes” entry.
- Every card page carries a “last verified” date visible at the top, the most reliable signal of how current that page is. If the date is more than 90 days old, treat the page as needing fresh verification against the bank's official site before applying.
Ordering
Whenever we order cards (comparison tables, similar-card suggestions), the order is determined by:
- Effective reward rate for the target spend pattern.
- Cap structure (a card with a ₹500/month cap can rank below a card with a lower rate but no cap).
- Excluded categories relevant to the use case.
- Fee and fee-waiver structure.
- Benefit quality (lounge access count, insurance coverage, etc.) where relevant.
We do not accept payment to place a card higher in comparisons or reviews. If we begin an affiliate program in the future, commission will not influence ordering, and affiliate links will be disclosed on the card page itself, not silently embedded.
AI assistance
Every reward rate, cap, fee, and rule on WhichWise is verified by a person against the bank's published terms, and a human reviews, edits, and signs off on every page before it goes live. We use large language models (primarily Anthropic Claude) as a research accelerator behind that process, helping summarize long T&C documents, structure our data, and run consistency checks across the catalogue. Nothing an AI produces is published as-is, and AI never sets a number or decides a ranking; the editorial responsibility for what you read is ours.
Corrections
If you find something wrong on a card page (an outdated fee, a missing exclusion, a wrong benefit), email hello@whichwise.comwith a link to the page and a source for the correction. We verify against the issuer's official page, correct it promptly, and add a “recent changes” entry on the card if the change is material.
We do not silently edit pages to hide past errors. If a correction changes a card's data or a reward figure in a way a reader relied on, we note it visibly.