How we write, check and correct what we publish

Who writes The Study Guild pages?

Named tutors, not a brand voice pretending to be a person. Each editorial page carries a reviewedBy field that must match an instructor slug. Placeholder tutors are labelled on the page, excluded from search indexes, and emit no Person entity in structured data. A photoreal face is never attached to a name we have not contracted.

That rule exists because a fictional clinician with a generated portrait would poison the expertise graph we are trying to earn. Lifestyle photography on programme and subject pages is editorial atmosphere. Identity is not. Until a tutor is under contract, the profile is a template with a warning, and it is noindexed so it cannot be cited as a real person.

Reviewers are the people who teach the subject. A menopause page is reviewed by the menopause tutor; an accountancy-AI page by the chartered accountant. We do not rotate a generic "editorial team" byline across fields we do not practise.

How is every page checked?

Two gates, deliberately different. Zod in the content schema blocks a page from rendering if a lead answer is outside 30–80 words or refers to "this page". The shipping gate, pnpm verify:seo, fails the deploy if answers are outside 40–60 words, if titles or descriptions duplicate, or if a comparison fails to concede a competitor advantage.

Disputable claims — a salary band, a regulatory requirement, a competitor's price, an hour count for an ICF application — must carry a primary source and a capture date. The source should be the operator or issuer's own page, not a round-up of other course sites. If we cannot source a number today, we omit it. "We do not know" is publishable. An invented figure in structured data is a defect that outweighs a hundred pages.

Accreditation marks render only when status is granted in site configuration. Seat counts render only when checkout enforces the cap against live enrolments. Prices come from content; the checkout form submits a plan and a cohort id, never an amount. Webhooks are the only authority for payment. None of those are editorial preferences. They are product commitments encoded so a future editor cannot quietly undo them.

What triggers a correction?

A fact that is wrong, a source that no longer says what we claimed, a date that moved without the content changing, or an accreditation status that drifted. We log confirmed corrections on the public corrections page with the date, the URL and what changed. We do not silently rewrite history and bump lastmod to look fresh.

Email hello@thestudyguild.com with the page address and what you believe is wrong. We verify against the primary source, not against the original draft. If you are right, we change the page, update lastReviewed only because the content changed, and add a line to /corrections. If you are pointing at a genuine disagreement rather than an error — two reasonable readings of the same guidance — we will say so rather than pretend there was a typo.

A lastmod that lies is worse than one that is old. We do not add a "what's new in 2026" paragraph to refresh a date. Comparison pages must be re-verified at least every 90 days or the build fails. That is how an out-of-date competitor claim is treated as a liability rather than an asset.

What will money not buy?

A better comparison row, a star rating, an accreditation logo, a discount, or a tutor identity. We do not take payment to rank a programme, we emit no aggregate rating below five genuine reviews, and founding cohorts get an extended guarantee rather than a launch price. Paid placement is not a product we sell.

The competitor we are positioned against runs permanent discounting. Copying that would teach buyers to wait and would contradict the one-price promise on every programme page. Founding-cohort terms are risk-reversal: a longer refund window, a price lock, curriculum input. They are not 20% off. Affiliate or sponsored links, if they ever appear, will carry a visible label and rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", enforced by a build gate rather than a promise.

We also will not buy our way around a missing approval. Where a statutory register or a licensed product exists — HCPC dietetics, BACP-accredited counsellor training, the NPQ for SENCOs, CIMSPA-endorsed personal training, local massage licences, MHFA England instructor training, BAMBA-registered teacher status, CNHC education-provider hypnotherapy — we may still sell an assessed cohort. The certificate names the approval we do not hold. The credential checker will tell you when we are the wrong provider. That costs enquiries. It is also the only version of those pages worth citing.

Who should skip this policy?

Skip it if you wanted terms of enrolment, privacy, or the refund window — those live under /legal and are still being solicitor-reviewed, so they are honestly unpublished rather than auto-generated. Skip it if you only wanted to pick a programme; start at upcoming cohorts or the credential checker instead.

Legal pages are noindexed while they are placeholders. Generating plausible-looking terms that have not been reviewed would read as binding and would not be. Until they ship, email hello@thestudyguild.com and we will answer in writing. That is slower than a fake policy. It is also true.