The rules we hold ourselves to

• No paid placements. No manufacturer, retailer or distributor has ever paid for a position on this site, and none ever will.
• No sponsored rankings. Commission rates vary by category and do not influence rank order. See the affiliate disclosure.
• No free-product-for-coverage arrangements. Nobody has sent us a product in exchange for coverage. If that ever changes, the page in question will say so in the body copy — not in a footer.
• No pre-publication review. No brand sees a page before it publishes, and no brand gets to approve or amend what we say about its product.
• No negative-coverage suppression. Several products on this site score below their market reputation, and the reasons are stated in their own entries.

A product is considered if it is currently sold and resolves to a real, buyable listing. Every ASIN on this site was resolved through a live catalog lookup, and a product that no longer resolves is removed rather than left to rot.

What disqualifies a product from being featured as a pick:

• It is not actually available. A discontinued model is not a recommendation.
• It cannot be linked to an earning destination. We do not feature products we cannot route to a tracked retailer, because a buy button that earns nothing is a broken business model dressed up as editorial generosity. Where that applies, we pick the closest comparable product that does earn and say so.
• Its listing publishes nothing. A flagship bow whose listing states only its own name cannot be recommended over one whose figures are published, and several entries on this site say exactly that.

Every factual claim on this site traces to one of four things:

1. A manufacturer’s published specification, presented as such. Where a maker publishes no figure, the row reads “Not published”.
2. Live product data from the Amazon Creators API, including every price and product image.
3. Arithmetic you can check, with the formula shown. The kinetic-energy and cocking-effort tables on this site are worked from published figures and the calculation is on the page.
4. Named third-party sources, linked. Independent testing, trade bodies, and state wildlife agencies for anything regulatory.

Every substantive page carries a Sources section listing what it drew on. Where we cannot source a claim, we do not make it — which is why several specification tables on this site have empty cells.

This is the section that matters most, because the failure mode in affiliate publishing is inventing authority rather than getting a fact wrong.

• No fabricated reviews, testimonials, reviewer names, quotes or star ratings. There is no testimonials section on this site and there will not be one unless we have real, attributable reviews to publish.
• No invented credentials. Mike M. is the hands-on owner behind Iron Mako Media. He holds no guide license, no archery-technician certification, no pro-staff affiliation, and no professional background that this site will claim for him.
• No invented testing. We do not run a test lab. We have not put a season behind every bow here. Where an assessment rests on published specifications, the page says so. See the methodology page.
• No “our team”. There is one author.
• No measured figures we did not measure. No decibel readings, no group sizes, no chronograph numbers. The one accuracy figure on this site is cited to Outdoor Life’s independent testing and attributed.
• No editorial scores in structured data. Our rubric scores are visible content and are deliberately never emitted as review-rating structured data, because doing so would contradict the paragraph above.
• No medical advice. Pages about shoulder injuries give you the published effort figures to take to a clinician. They do not tell you what your body can do.
• No state-by-state regulation table. The rules change annually and a table that is wrong is worse than none. We give you the framework and point you at your own wildlife agency.

Corrections are noted, not silently edited. When we change a factual claim on a page, the page records that it changed and when. A site that quietly rewrites its mistakes is asking you to trust a version of itself you cannot check.

The process:

1. You email contact@stringandstock.com or use the contact form. Corrections go to the front of the queue.
2. We check the claim against the manufacturer’s own published figure or the primary source.
3. If we were wrong, the page is corrected and its modified date updated.
4. If the correction changes a recommendation, the ranking changes with it.

• Prices: daily. A scheduled refresh pulls live prices and product images. Numbers older than 48 hours disappear on their own.
• Product availability: continuously. A product that stops resolving to a buyable listing is flagged on the page and then replaced.
• Rankings: as the inputs change. A discontinued model, a sustained price change, a newly-published specification or independent testing that contradicts us all trigger a review of the page.
• Regulatory pages: annually and on report. Season rules change, and the regulations page is a framework rather than a table for exactly that reason.
• Every page carries its own modified date in the byline. Nothing here claims to be fresher than it is.

No hype adjectives, no manufactured urgency, no scarcity claims, and no discount claim that is not coming from live data. If a page tells you a product is on sale, it is because Amazon reported a discount at the last price refresh.

We also do not tell you the most expensive option is the right one. A `5 lb` cocking effort on a mid-priced bow beats a `470 fps` figure you cannot use, and the rankings on this site reflect that.

String & Stock is owned and published by Iron Mako Media and written by Mike M.. It is funded entirely by affiliate commission — no advertising, no sponsored content, no paid newsletters. An independent, reader-funded publisher run by Mike M. under Iron Mako Media.

This policy was last reviewed on 2026-10-06.