Set up your client project: candidate lists, claim rules and scoring weights
Juma projects work per client rather than per task. The team builds one project for each client, adds context to it over time, and every Flow run inside it starts from that shared ground. For roundups the context that changes the output most is the part the open web cannot tell you: which products the client will and will not name, what the client is allowed to claim about them, and how this publication decides an order. If the project already exists, these are additions to it rather than a fresh setup.
What to add
Category Candidate List
The products the client wants covered, the ones they will not name, and any they have covered before. With this in the project the considered-and-cut list reflects a real editorial position rather than whatever the search results surfaced that morning.
Claims and Disclosure Rules
The markets the client publishes in, the disclosure wording their counsel has already approved, and who signs off on comparative copy. This turns the audit from a general risk template into the specific review the legal reviewer asked for.
Editorial Standards and Scoring Weights
How this publication ranks: the criteria that matter, the weight on each, and what disqualifies an entry. Keeping the weights in the project is what makes two roundups published three months apart comparable to each other.
Brand Voice Guide
How the client sounds, the words they use and the ones they avoid. Roundup copy drifts toward vendor language faster than any other format, so the voice guide is what keeps each entry sounding like the publication rather than the product page.
Guide Juma with project info
Each file in a project can carry a short description in the project info field. Those descriptions tell Juma what a file holds and when it matters, so the right context gets picked up for the task at hand rather than everything at once.
- Category Candidate List: "Products we cover, products we will not name, and what we have already published. Use to set the candidate set and the cut list."
- Claims and Disclosure Rules: "Our markets, approved disclosure wording and who signs off. Use for every row of the claims audit."
- Editorial Standards and Scoring Weights: "How we rank and what disqualifies an entry. Use as the published weights for the scoring model."
- Brand Voice Guide: "How we sound and what we avoid. Apply to every entry so the copy does not drift into vendor language."
Publish a roundup that earns its order
Frequently Asked Questions
What stops this from being another generic best-tools post?
Three things a generic roundup does not have: a published methodology naming what was read and what was cut, an entry matrix where every price and feature carries its source URL and check date, and a ranking whose arithmetic is printed next to each total so a reader can redo the sum.
The generic version is recognisable by what it hedges. It lists one price per product with an asterisk, repeats the same two features in every row, and orders the list without saying why. Each of those is a place where the research stopped early and the prose covered for it.
The matrix is what makes that impossible to hide. A cell either carries a dated source or it says "could not verify", and a reviewer can see at a glance which parts of the piece are evidence and which are still open.
What happens when a price cannot be verified?
The cell says so. It records which page was read, the date it was read, and that the public material did not state a number, rather than filling the gap with a figure from a review site or an older version of the pricing page. An unverified cell is visible in both the article and the matrix.
That matters more than it sounds for a ranking. If price transparency carries weight in the model, a product whose pricing is genuinely not published should score differently from one whose page nobody opened, and those two cases are only distinguishable if the gap is recorded honestly.
The re-check schedule then puts those cells first. Pricing is the fastest-rotting field in any roundup, so it is flagged for re-verification before every update rather than on a quarterly cycle.
Can it rank our own product alongside competitors?
Yes, and the audit treats that as a material connection to be disclosed rather than a detail to leave out. It produces the wording for the case where the publisher owns an entry, flags every claim about that entry as needing the same substantiation as the others, and notes where the disclosure belongs on the page.
The scoring model does the harder part of the work. Because the weights and the per-criterion scores are published, a reader can see exactly which criteria carried the publisher's own product, which is a far stronger answer to the obvious accusation than a sentence promising impartiality.
Does the schema actually match what readers see?
That is the specific thing it is built to get right. The list order in the structured data is the order on the page, itemListOrder states which direction it runs, and every list item references its product node by id so position and entry cannot drift apart when the order changes.
Mismatched structured data is the common failure in roundups, usually because the schema was written once and the running order was edited afterwards. The re-check schedule treats rank and schema as one field for that reason: change the order, regenerate the markup, check it before deploy.
How long does this take compared with writing a roundup by hand?
Researching eight products across their pricing and feature pages, building a defensible comparison matrix and writing the piece is usually three to five days of a writer's time, most of it spent on tabs rather than on sentences. Running this Flow returns the evidence base, the scoring model, the draft and the audit in one working session.
What the session does not decide is which criteria deserve the weight, whether a product belongs in the category at all, and which claims are worth defending in public. Those are editorial calls. Strategy, taste and judgment stay human, and no claim reaches publication without a named person signing it off.
The fact-check gets shorter too. A reviewer who can click the source on any cell spends their time on the judgment calls instead of rebuilding the research from scratch to find out whether a number is right.