Methodology

The certification bodies we aggregate

Status for every certification shown is sourced from these bodies' own public listings. Each entry links out so you can verify directly with the certifying body.

• Informed

  Informed Sport / Informed Choice — banned-substance testing for athletes.

• NSF

  NSF Certified for Sport & NSF dietary supplement certification.

• USP

  U.S. Pharmacopeia Verified Dietary Supplements program.

• NASC

  National Animal Supplement Council quality seal (pet supplements).

• Labdoor

  Independent lab testing and ranking of supplement products.

• BSCG

  Banned Substances Control Group — Certified Drug Free testing.

How certification status is determined

• We prefer each body's official downloadable or full-listing export over scraping individual pages, and cache raw fetches for auditability.
• A brand/product is shown as certified only when it appears on the certifying body's own listing. We record the body, the status, the date we last verified it, and a link to the source listing — all surfaced on every brand page.
• Listings are refreshed on a weekly refresh job. Each certification's “verified” date reflects when our data last matched the source.

How we rank

We don't assign fake #1–#N rankings — most brands hold the same number of certifications, so sequential ranks would be false precision. Instead, on each supplement page brands are grouped into honest tiers by the number of distinct independent third-party certifications on their products of that type (more bodies = higher tier, e.g. “Verified by 2 independent bodies”). The highest tier is marked ”Most independently tested.”

Within a tier, brands are ordered by factual depth and recency only: first by how many of their products are certified, then by how recently each was verified (most recent first), then by Labdoor letter grade where one is on record (A > B > C > D > F), and finally by brand name.

Tiers and within-tier order are not a measure of efficacy, not a measure of price or value, and not an endorsement. A higher tier means only that the brand is verified by more independent testing programs — not that its formula is better. Always verify current certification status with the certifying body.

How we resolve brands

Cert bodies name the same brand inconsistently. We resolve brands using a human-curated dictionary of confirmed matches — fuzzy matching is used only to suggest candidates into a human review queue, never to auto-merge brands. The curated dictionary is the reviewed source of truth, which keeps false merges out of the index.