How we audit, step by step.
Every vendor on the leaderboard goes through the same protocol. No press kits, no comped samples, no draft previews. The score is what the chromatograms say, not what the vendor wants us to write.
How an audit actually works.
FULL RUBRIC →Every test order ships to a private mailbox under an alias. No press kits, no comp samples, no tells.
Vials go to one of two labs we rotate between. Blind to vendor until after the report is filed.
Order placed, label created, in-transit, delivered, opened. Tracked across at least three orders.
Purity 40%. Label accuracy 25%. Shipping 20%. Customer service 15%. Full rubric is published.
The protocol in detail
SIX-PART RUBRIC01 / Anonymous test orders
Every audit cycle, we place at least three orders per vendor under aliases. Orders ship to a private mailbox unconnected to the publication. We pay retail and we pay in the same payment methods our readers would use — typically crypto for grey-market vendors, cards where they're available.
Vendors who recognize us and offer comped product or expedited treatment have their order flagged and re-placed under a different alias from a different address. The score for that cycle uses the second order, not the first.
02 / Independent lab analysis
Vials are unboxed on camera and sent to one of two third-party labs we rotate between. The labs do not know which vendor sent which sample until after the report is filed. Tests include reverse-phase HPLC for purity quantification and mass spectrometry for identity confirmation.
Where vendor-supplied COAs differ from our independent lab results by more than 5 percentage points on purity, the discrepancy is published in the vendor's audit notes and weighted into the COA-quality subscore.
03 / Shipping & service log
Every order's timeline is logged: order placed, label created, in-transit first scan, delivered, opened. Median across at least three orders becomes the shipping subscore.
Customer service is tested by submitting one realistic question and one deliberately confusing question per cycle. Response time, tone, and accuracy all factor into the support subscore.
04 / The composite score
We don't average the four subscores — we weight them. Weighting reflects what actually matters for a research buyer:
- Purity / COA quality — 40%
- Label accuracy — 25%
- Shipping — 20%
- Customer service / support — 15%
A score of 90 or above means “buy with confidence.” 70–89 is “works, with caveats.” Below 70 means we've found enough red flags that the audit notes deserve a careful read before ordering.
05 / Refresh cadence
Audits are republished on a quarterly cycle. Within a cycle, scores can move if a vendor changes lab partners, payment processors, or shipping carriers, or if a reader-submitted COA contradicts our most recent finding. Material changes are noted in the corrections log.
06 / What we don't test
We don't evaluate clinical safety, dose efficacy, or human-use outcomes. Compounds discussed on this site are referenced from peer-reviewed literature and sold by vendors as research-grade material.
How third-party peptide testing works
Independent peptide testing pairs reverse-phase HPLC with mass spectrometry to answer the two questions a buyer actually has: is this the compound on the label (identity), and how much of it is what the label says (purity). HPLC separates the sample by hydrophobicity and quantifies the main peak against impurity peaks to produce the headline purity percentage. Mass spec confirms the molecular weight matches the target sequence, which is how identity gets verified.
Janoshik Analytical runs this pipeline on the bulk of the publicly-visible peptide-testing corpus. Our local mirror of their public-tests database covers thousands of tests across 200+ compounds. The full purity analysis read is here.
We mirror three additional third-party labs to widen the picture. Liquilabspublishes Particle Peptides' COAs from the Czech Republic. MZ Biolabs runs Ascension's testing. Kovera Labs began publishing in early 2026 and serves a US-facing slice of the market. A lab is treated as a credible source when its corpus is broad across vendors and its failures are visible in public, the same criteria covered in our Janoshik audit.