This page sets out how Doubao English decides what to publish, how we check it, how we use AI assistance, and how advertising is kept away from editorial judgement. We publish it because a site about AI products ought to be transparent about its own methods.
Last updated: 23 August 2026.
Sourcing
Every specification, price, date, model name and availability claim on this site has to be traceable to a source before it is published. In practice that means a hierarchy:
- Primary sources first. ByteDance and Volcengine announcements and documentation, official app-store listings, published terms and privacy policies, and the operator’s own help pages.
- Reputable secondary reporting second. Established news organisations and named research firms, cited by name and date, when a primary source does not exist or is not public.
- Nothing else. We do not source facts from aggregator blogs, SEO content farms, AI-generated summaries of other sites, or unattributed social posts.
Where a number comes from a research firm rather than the company — user counts are the usual case — we name the firm and the month the figure refers to, because “monthly active users” means different things in different datasets.
Dating and freshness
Claims about a moving product are dated. Articles carry a “last updated” line, tables and tools carry the date their underlying data was last reviewed, and time-sensitive statements are written as “as of” rather than as permanent truths. When ByteDance ships something that changes a claim we have made, we update the affected pages rather than leaving a stale article to rank.
What we will not do
Some rules are absolute, and we would rather publish less than break them:
- We do not invent hands-on experience. If we have not tested something, we do not write as though we have. Much of Doubao is only fully available to users with mainland Chinese accounts, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
- We do not guess at specifications. An unverifiable claim is removed, not hedged into something vague that still reads as fact.
- We do not blur fact and rumour. Reported and rumoured items are labelled as such, with the outlet and date attached, and kept visually separate from confirmed announcements.
- We do not publish circumvention guidance. No advice on bypassing phone verification, regional restrictions or terms of service, and no links to APK mirrors or unofficial builds.
- We do not fearmonger or whitewash. On privacy and censorship we report what the policies say and what independent researchers have found, including the parts that are uncomfortable in either direction.
AI assistance, disclosed
We use AI tools in producing this site — for research assistance, drafting and editing. We think readers of a site about AI deserve to be told that plainly rather than to discover it.
What that does not change is the standard applied to the output. AI tools are not treated as sources: a fact does not enter an article because a model asserted it, but because it was traced to a source and checked. Every page is reviewed against that sourcing hierarchy before publication, and responsibility for what appears here is entirely ours.
Corrections
Substantive corrections — anything that changes the meaning of a claim — are made in the article and noted at the foot of the page with the date of the change. Typos, broken links and formatting fixes are made silently. If a claim proves unverifiable rather than false, we remove it and state what we could not confirm. We do not delete pages to bury errors.
Corrections can be sent to [email protected]; a source link makes them much faster to act on.
Advertising and independence
This site is funded by display advertising, served by third-party networks. We do not accept sponsored posts, paid links, guest posts or gifts, and we do not sell placement in any comparison or ranking. No advertiser sees an article before publication or has any influence over what we cover or conclude. Where advertising appears, it is visually distinct from editorial content.
We have no relationship with ByteDance — no funding, no early access, no briefings — and our conclusions about Doubao are reached the same way as our conclusions about its competitors. See our about page and disclaimer for the rest.