Editorial Guidelines

This page describes the editorial standards every article on DeepSeek AI Guide is written against. We publish it because the rules we follow internally are exactly the rules a careful reader would want us to follow — and because, in a field where a lot of writing is generated and recycled at speed, the discipline matters more than the volume.

If you read something on this site that breaks any of these standards, write to [email protected]. We will fix it.

Last updated: April 25, 2026.

1. Independence and incentives

  • DeepSeek AI Guide is independent of DeepSeek and the other model providers we cover. We do not receive payment, advance access, or free API credit from any vendor whose product we write about.
  • We do not currently carry advertising, sponsored posts, or affiliate links. If that ever changes, every affected article will carry a top-of-article disclosure and the change will be logged on the Disclaimer page.
  • What we cover, how we grade, and which products we compare are editorial decisions made by the team — not by anything outside it.

2. The baseline-facts discipline

Every article is written against an internal “baseline facts” reference for DeepSeek: the current model IDs, prices, context windows, licensing terms, and API behaviours. Writers may not contradict these without a fresh, dated source that supersedes them. The baseline covers, among other things:

  • Current and previous-generation model IDs (e.g., deepseek-v4-pro, deepseek-v4-flash, and the legacy deepseek-chat / deepseek-reasoner retiring 2026-07-24 15:59 UTC).
  • Per-tier pricing as published on DeepSeek’s pricing page.
  • Per-model licensing — MIT for the recent generation, separate DeepSeek Model License for some older releases.
  • API architecture: stateless /chat/completions; OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible endpoints; thinking mode as a request parameter, not a separate model ID; reasoning_content alongside content.

If the public state of any of these changes — DeepSeek announces a new release, alters pricing, retires a model ID earlier than scheduled — affected articles are updated and their “Last verified” dates refreshed.

3. Sourcing rules

  • Pricing claims are anchored with the date of verification and a link to DeepSeek’s official pricing page. We do not quote a price without saying when we checked it.
  • Benchmark numbers name the benchmark, the model version, and the source — DeepSeek’s technical report, an independent leaderboard, or a provider page. We do not write a benchmark number from memory.
  • Comparative claims against other models (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Llama, Qwen, Kimi, etc.) are either softened — “among the cheapest”, “competitive on agentic benchmarks” — or backed by a dated comparison table that names the competitor’s pricing or benchmark with a source URL.
  • Regulatory claims are tied to the named jurisdiction and the date of the action (for example, “Italy’s Garante ordered blocking of the DeepSeek app in January 2025”). We do not generalise from one country’s action to a worldwide one.

4. Banned phrasing

Some words are banned in our writing because they almost always carry a marketing voice we do not use, or because they overstate what the underlying source supports. Examples:

  • Revolutionary, cutting-edge, game-changing, groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting — vacuous superlatives.
  • Leverages, seamless, unleash, delve, elevate, empower — generic LLM filler.
  • Unparalleled, unmatched, best-in-class, state-of-the-art — unfalsifiable absolutes; we use “leading” or quote the specific benchmark when we mean it.
  • The best [X], the most powerful [X], the cheapest [X] — without an evidence table or a defensive scope (“among the cheapest”), these are not allowed in declarative prose. They are allowed inside attributed direct quotes and inside FAQ headings (“What is the best DeepSeek model for X?”) because the heading is a question we then answer with caveats.
  • Visible chain-of-thought, shows its work, transparent reasoning — marketing phrasing for the API. We say what the API actually returns: reasoning_content alongside content.

These rules apply to our own prose. Direct quotes from external sources are preserved as written, with attribution.

5. AI assistance and human responsibility

We use large language models — including DeepSeek and Anthropic’s Claude — to draft long-form articles. This is openly disclosed. The discipline that makes the writing trustworthy is not avoidance of LLMs; it is the editorial process around them:

  • Every article is generated against an explicit editorial brief, the baseline facts, and a per-topic prompt — not from a one-line content prompt.
  • Web search is used during generation to refresh prices, benchmarks, and any time-sensitive claim.
  • A human editor reviews every article before publication for factual accuracy, banned-phrase hygiene, citation quality, and consistency with the rest of the site.
  • The byline rests with the editorial team. The model is a writing tool, not the author of record.

If the use of AI for any specific article goes beyond drafting — for example, if a model is the primary subject of evaluation rather than just the writer — we say so in the article itself.

6. Corrections

  • Reader-reported errors that we accept as factual corrections are fixed in the article in place. The “Last verified” line is refreshed.
  • For substantive corrections — a quoted price was wrong, a benchmark was misattributed, a license was misstated — we add a short editor’s note inside the article describing what changed and when.
  • For minor cosmetic edits — typos, link rot, formatting — we do not annotate, but we do refresh the verified date.
  • We do not silently rewrite articles to disguise an earlier mistake.

7. Scope discipline

  • Articles cover topics where we can be useful: DeepSeek models and ecosystem, the API, deployment, fine-tuning, comparisons against named competitors, regulatory developments that materially affect users.
  • We do not publish content outside that scope just because a keyword is profitable.
  • We do not cover Chinese-language community speculation or unsourced rumour. If a story is moving in the field but no on-the-record source exists, we wait.

8. Plagiarism and reuse

  • Articles are written from primary sources — DeepSeek’s reports, provider pricing pages, benchmark leaderboards — not by paraphrasing other secondary articles.
  • Where another publication’s framing or analysis has shaped a paragraph, we attribute it.
  • We do not republish another writer’s work under our byline. Where we quote, we quote with attribution.

9. Reach us