How Vets Compared checks pet health plans

Sources we read

Facts come from provider and administrator websites, clinic plan pages, terms and conditions, brochures and PDFs, checkout or joining pages where a price is shown, and clinic verification inside the practice portal. An administrator source is treated as the same class of evidence as a provider website when it publishes the current product.

Exact, indicative, and not listed

An exact price is a published figure that matches the species, weight, and age band shown. An indicative price is shown when the catalogue figure can change by clinic or by an unpublished band. A structural not-listed status means we checked and the provider does not publish a price. Unknown means we have not yet researched that field. Unknown does not mean excluded.

How a comparison is resolved

Species, age, and weight matching use the published bands on each price row, including puppy or senior ranges and half-open weight ranges. A clinic-level offer overrides a group offer. A group offer overrides the product fallback. Coverage and terms are whole snapshots, not patched fields. Null on a field means unknown, never inherited from another offer.

Only currently effective rows are used. An offer or price with a closed effective date cannot keep a comparison or a family page current. When sources conflict, the latest retrieved evidence date is shown as last checked, and the conflicting fact stays unknown rather than guessed.

How often we recheck

Provider and administrator pages are recrawled after the last retrieved evidence date for that product. A new check opens a new price, coverage, or terms version and closes the previous open row. Last checked is the latest retrieved evidence date, not a marketing freshness claim. We do not patch a single field onto an older snapshot.

What we do not claim

These products are not insurance. We do not repeat unsupported saving claims. We do not invent a single national price when the published data is a range. Future commercial arrangements or commissions do not change factual coverage, terms, or this method. Provider corrections are applied by updating the catalogue and closing the previous open version, not by deleting history.