How our recommendations work

No black box, no sales funnel. Here's the scoring, the weights, and the promises behind them.

It's rules, not roulette

The Storm Readiness Check is a fixed set of rules, written down in advance. Eleven checks carry points; the points sum to a 0 to 100 score on a spectrum from Unprepared to Storm-ready. Because it's deterministic, the same answers always produce the same result. There's no AI judgment call deciding what to show you, and no algorithm optimizing for what earns us more.

The weights

Life-safety basics carry the most weight, because they protect the most for the least money. Structure matters, but a house with boarded windows and no drinking water has the priorities backwards.

Check	Weight	Why it's weighted this way
Water on hand	10	The cheapest, highest-stakes line on any preparedness list
Food & medicines	10	Closed stores and pharmacies are the certain part of every storm
Window protection	10	Openings are how wind gets into the envelope
Flood zone knowledge	10	Free to learn, and it drives insurance and evacuation logic downstream
Insurance readiness	10	The wind deductible and the flood question decide the financial outcome
Roof	10	The envelope's first line; invisible from the driveway
Backup power	8	Outages are the longest part of most storms
Alerts & communication	8	Official guidance only helps if it can reach you
Documents & photos	8	Claims move at the speed of documentation
Garage door	8	A known weak point in high wind
Evacuation plan	8	Logistics owned in advance; the go/stay call itself belongs to officials

Three questions carry no points at all: where you're starting from (it only sets the pacing of the result), the home type (it only adjusts phrasing and adds honest notes for mobile homes and rentals), and who's in the household (it only adds guidance for elderly parents, pets, children, and medical equipment). "Not applicable" answers, like having no garage, award full credit rather than punishing you.

The score bands

0 to 24 reads as Unprepared, 25 to 49 as Getting started, 50 to 69 as Partly ready, 70 to 89 as Nearly ready, and 90 to 100 as Storm-ready. The bands only change the framing of the result, never the guidance inside it.

The guardrails we've built in

Officials outrank us, in the logic itself. Nothing in any result tells you whether to evacuate or stay. The evacuation question scores your logistics (do you know your zone, destination, and route), and every mention of the decision routes to your local emergency management.
Urgency changes the pace, not the pitch. Telling the check a storm is coming compresses the result to what 48 hours genuinely allows. It does not add products; it removes them.
Medical equipment escalates honestly. When someone in the household depends on powered medical equipment, backup power jumps to the top of the ranking, because that's true, not because generators have an affiliate program.
Cheap fixes rank by impact, not price. The gap ranking weighs how much each gap matters. Most top-ranked gaps happen to be the cheapest ones, and the result says so plainly.
Money can't touch the logic. Partners never see the rules, can't pay to change them, and the guidance text is identical whether or not an affiliate link exists for it. Where no partner exists yet, the button honestly says "Coming soon".

Why the language is careful

Storm risk is local. Building codes, evacuation zones, flood maps, and insurance rules all vary by state, county, and sometimes street. That's why our explanations say "generally" and "commonly", why the flood-zone answer routes you to FEMA's own map lookup rather than guessing, and why structural and insurance decisions always route to licensed local professionals.

Where the claims come from

The class facts we state (the gallon-per-person-per-day water figure, generator carbon monoxide safety, food-safety windows after an outage, the flood insurance waiting period pattern) follow published federal preparedness and safety guidance, deliberately hedged and kept free of statistics and dollar figures. Every factual claim on this site is tracked in an internal verification log before it ships.

How we pick the products

Some tools end with a specific product suggestion. Here is exactly how those are chosen, and how they are kept from bending the guidance.

One pick per gap, matched to the diagnosis. A product only appears when the tool has actually surfaced the gap it answers. If your readiness check never flags the water gap, you never see a water product. There are no default placements and no catalog: the most any one person sees is a handful of items tied to their own top gaps.
Chosen on specifications, not on hands-on testing. We do not lab-test these items, and we do not claim to. Picks are made by reading the published specs and matching them to the job: the capacity or fit for the task (gallons, watts, lumens, hours), the presence of the relevant safety certification, a documented track record rather than a brand-new unknown, and an honest price tier so the primary pick is a sensible default rather than the most expensive option.
No ratings, ours or theirs. We do not show star counts, review totals, or a score of our own. Those imply a level of independent verification we have not done. Each card gets one plain sentence on why the item fits the gap, and nothing more.
A primary and, at most, one alternate. Each card names one primary pick and sometimes a single plain-text alternate for a different budget or use (a compact version, a lockable version). Never a wall of options.
Sunny-day only. Product links belong to calm-weather planning: the readiness check, the supply calculator, the sizing helper, and the guides. When you tell a tool a storm is imminent, or on the 48-Hour Checklist, the product links disappear and the advice becomes "buy this locally today," with no link, because on a deadline a hardware store beats waiting on shipping.
The commission never touches the pick. Product links are affiliate links, to Amazon and to equipment partners such as Bluetti (through the Awin network); a purchase may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. The item chosen is the one that fits the gap or the diagnosed tier, not the one that pays more, and every card says plainly that it is an affiliate link. The same rules apply to every partner: one matched pick, specifications rather than hype, and no prices on our pages, because sale pricing changes and a stale number would be a false claim. Categories where the honest answer is not a product (a normal grocery run, a licensed generator installer, an insurance quote) route there instead.