Every product page makes claims. The skill worth building isn't cynicism about all of them — it's a quick, repeatable way to sort the claims that mean something from the ones that are just well-written filler. Here's the framework we use ourselves before recommending anything.
Ask: can this claim actually be wrong?
A testable claim is one that could, in principle, turn out to be false — "charges to 80% in 35 minutes," "rated for 50,000 hours," "holds 12 hours of continuous use." You can check these against a spec sheet, a teardown review, or your own stopwatch. An untestable claim is phrased so it can never really be disproven — "supports overall wellness," "premium quality materials," "engineered for performance." Nobody can run an experiment that falsifies "supports overall wellness," which is exactly why it shows up so often: it sounds meaningful while committing to nothing.
Specific numbers beat confident adjectives
"Industry-leading battery life" tells you nothing comparable. "11-hour battery life at 50% brightness" tells you something you can actually compare against a competitor's spec sheet. When a product page leads with adjectives (leading, premium, revolutionary, cutting-edge) instead of numbers, that's not automatically dishonest, but it usually means the specific numbers — if you dig for them — are unremarkable. Companies generally lead with their strongest, most specific selling point when they have one.
Watch for the "proprietary" dodge
"Proprietary blend," "proprietary formula," and "proprietary technology" are sometimes legitimate trade-secret protection, and sometimes a way to avoid disclosing amounts or mechanisms that would let you evaluate the claim yourself. The tell isn't the word "proprietary" alone — it's whether the company discloses enough around it for the claim to be checkable at all. A supplement listing a "proprietary blend" with a total weight but no per-ingredient breakdown, for instance, makes it impossible to know if the effective ingredient is present in a meaningful amount or a token amount.
Third-party validation outranks self-reported testing
"Lab tested" means much less when you don't know which lab, using what protocol, funded by whom. A claim backed by an independent certification body, a published third-party test, or a standard everyone in the category is measured against (a specific IP rating for water resistance, a specific ANSI or ISO standard) is a stronger signal than "our lab confirmed" with no further detail. This doesn't mean self-reported testing is always false — it means it carries less weight than testing you can independently verify.
A short red-flag checklist
- Vague benefit language with no mechanism explained ("detoxifies," "boosts," "balances")
- Numbers without units or comparison points ("50% more effective" — than what?)
- "Proprietary" anything with zero disclosed detail
- Testimonials or before/after photos used as the primary evidence instead of data
- A claim that would be remarkable if true, with no independent source repeating it
The takeaway
None of this means every enthusiastic product page is lying — plenty of genuinely good products are marketed with confident language too. The point of the framework is to separate the claims worth weighing in your decision from the ones that are just tone. If you can't imagine what evidence would prove a claim false, it's not really a claim — it's marketing copy shaped like one.