How We Use AI

Calorie Rankings uses AI tools (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini) at multiple stages of our editorial workflow. This page describes exactly what AI does and does not do on this site.

What AI does

• Research summarization — summarizing long-form sources (academic papers, app documentation, industry analyses) into reference notes for human editors
• Copy editing — clarity, sentence structure, redundancy, tone consistency on already-drafted content
• Content drafting — generating first drafts of FAQ items, glossary entries, and structured comparison rows, which a human editor then verifies, edits, and rewrites
• Schema generation — drafting JSON-LD structured data templates from existing content
• Translation review — when we expand to non-English content (not yet), AI will assist with translation, with native-speaker review before publication

What AI does not do

• Score apps — every score is computed from the published rubric by a human editor working from the test data
• Decide winners in comparisons — head-to-head winners are determined by the criterion table; the table is built by a human editor
• Cite sources — every academic citation is verified by a human editor against the source. We do not let AI generate references because AI is well-known to hallucinate plausible-looking but non-existent citations
• Make factual claims — claims about app pricing, features, database size, etc. are verified against the app's official documentation by a human editor. Where verification fails, the claim is removed or hedged
• Approve content for publication — every page on this site has been read, edited, and approved by a human editor before publication

Why we disclose this

The honest reality of 2026 publishing is that AI assists most editorial workflows. Sites that claim to be "100% human-written" with no AI involvement are usually being misleading; sites that don't disclose AI usage at all are leaving readers to guess. We think the more useful framing is: what does the AI actually do, and what does a human verify before publication?

For accuracy claims, scoring, and factual statements about the apps we cover, the answer is: a human editor is the source of truth and the AI is an editing/drafting tool. For long-form prose, FAQ generation, and clarity edits, the AI is more involved and the human editor reviews for accuracy.

Our criterion: would a human editor stake their reputation on this claim?

The internal test for whether a sentence, claim, or score can be published: would a human editor put their name on this if our authorship model were bylined? For factual claims, the answer needs to be yes — which means the editor has verified the claim against a source. For analysis and verdict language, the answer needs to be yes — which means the editor has read the AI draft and either accepted it as their own analysis or rewritten it.

The risks we watch for

• Hallucinated citations — we verify every academic reference by DOI or source URL
• Hallucinated app features — pricing, database size, feature lists are verified against the app's official documentation
• Training-data staleness — AI models have cutoff dates and may report 2023 pricing or 2024 feature lists as current. We verify against 2026 documentation
• Generic SEO drift — AI tends to generate generic, vague prose. We rewrite for specificity and remove filler
• Misattributed competitor claims — AI sometimes generates "Cronometer says X" when Cronometer never said X. We verify direct quotes against the source

If you spot AI-generated content that wasn't reviewed

Email editors@calorierankings.com with subject [AI REVIEW FAILURE]. We will audit the page and post a correction. The standard we hold ourselves to: a human editor approves every published claim. If we fail that standard, that's a serious editorial failure and we will fix it transparently.