How We Evaluate Robot Mowers

This page describes exactly how a mower gets from a manufacturer's specification sheet onto a recommendation on this site.

1. Where the data comes from

In order of preference:

1. The official manufacturer product page for that specific model.
2. The official product manual.
3. Official technical documentation — datasheets, specification PDFs.
4. An authorised retailer, only where the manufacturer publishes nothing and the retailer is an official channel.

We do not take specifications from other comparison sites, from marketplace listings, from forums, or from an AI model's memory. Where a figure cannot be traced to one of the four sources above, it is recorded as not published.

2. What gets recorded

For each mower we record around forty fields covering working area, slope, navigation, cutting, power, protection, connectivity and physical dimensions.

Every one of them can hold three kinds of value: a figure, an explicit "no", or unknown. That third state is what makes the rest of the system honest — "unknown" never silently becomes "no".

3. Verification

A record is marked verified only when:

• at least one source URL is attached, and
• the specifications shown match that source, and
• the date of checking is recorded.

That date is displayed publicly on every mower page. If it is old, the page says so.

Records that fail these tests are still visible, but they are excluded from being used as a genuine recommendation, and they receive no structured data for search engines.

4. How the fit score is calculated

The Mower Finder is deterministic arithmetic. There is no AI in the recommendation path, and no element of editorial preference.

Points are allocated as follows:

• Lawn size — 35 points. A hard gate. The manufacturer's rated working area must cover the lawn you enter, and meeting it earns the whole dimension — a larger rating is not scored higher, because no manufacturer publishes a headroom requirement we could honestly apply.
• Slope — 20 points. A hard gate whenever you enter a gradient. A model that does not publish a slope rating is excluded rather than guessed at.
• Navigation and garden shape — 20 points. Trees, narrow passages, rough ground and wire-free preference.
• Zones — 10 points. Awarded when multi-zone support is documented.
• Budget — 15 points. A model priced above your maximum is removed from the results. A model with no recently checked price earns nothing here and is flagged as unchecked.

The score is the points earned as a percentage of the points available for the criteria you actually entered.

5. Hard requirements versus soft ones

Some of what you tell the Finder is treated as absolute. If your lawn is 1,200 m² and a mower is rated for 800 m², it is removed from the results rather than shown with a low score — a mower that cannot cover the lawn is not a worse option, it is not an option.

The same applies to slope, to multi-zone when you need it, and to wire-free when you require it.

Critically, a mower whose manufacturer has not published the relevant figure is also excluded, with the reason stated. We cannot demonstrate that it meets your requirement, so we do not imply that it does. The Finder lists every exclusion and why.

6. Category verdicts, not overall winners

On comparison pages we award verdicts such as "best for steep terrain" or "best for large lawns". Each is earned by a published number being measurably ahead of the others, and each is awarded only when every model in the comparison publishes that figure — otherwise the comparison would be unfair to the model that is simply more transparent.

We do not declare an overall winner. Which mower is best depends on the garden it is going into, and a comparison page does not know your garden. The Mower Finder does.

7. Prices

Where we track a price, we record the date it was checked. Prices older than the configured threshold are hidden from public pages automatically rather than shown stale.

We do not claim to find the lowest price anywhere, because we do not compare prices across retailers. Our buttons say "Check Price" for that reason.

8. What we never do

• Invent or estimate a specification
• Claim to have tested a mower we have not tested
• Publish star ratings or review scores we did not produce from real evaluation
• Let commission rates influence a recommendation
• Create a category page that does not have enough verified mowers to be genuinely useful

That last one is why some category pages on this site are shorter than you might expect, and why some are marked as still being built.