Editorial standards

Spain Smile Guide covers a category in which most publications are either the clinics themselves or the platforms that charge the clinics for placement. We are neither. The standards below are the ones we work to, and the ones readers are entitled to hold us to. None of this is aspiration — every commitment on this page is already operational, and the supporting pages it links to are live.

The three documents this page links to

Three pages on this site together constitute the publication's public standards. Each is maintained; each is dated.

• Methodology — the twelve-dimension rubric we apply to every clinic we evaluate, published in full, dated, with a revision log at its foot.
• Corrections — a chronological, public log of every factual correction made to a piece on this site. Substantive corrections are also surfaced at the top of the affected article for one month after they are made.
• About — the publication's editorial disclosure, the identity of the team behind it, the affiliation with the ACE DNTL STUDIO group, and the funding model that makes the work possible.

Readers sceptical of any specific claim in any piece should begin on one of those three pages. They are the infrastructure under the writing.

What we will not do

Any one of the following is a reason to kill a piece before it publishes. These are drawn from our internal governance document; we surface them here in the voice a reader can use.

1. We will not let the writing sound like marketing. The editorial voice on this site is analytical, long-form, and occasionally dry. If a piece begins to read like a clinic's own copy — ACE DNTL's included — it is rewritten or it is not published.
2. We will not let any single clinic dominate the writing. ACE DNTL is mentioned at most twice in any article that mentions it at all, and not at all in rubric-teaching pieces where the subject is how to evaluate rather than who to choose. The same discipline applies to every other clinic we cover.
3. We will not rank clinics. No numeric positions. No "best in Marbella" ordering. Comparison pieces describe where each practice leads and where it trails, on the same dimensions, in the same order. The reader does the ranking.
4. We will not publish thin content. Every piece earns its length. Comparison and reference pieces on this site sit above 1,500 words as a working minimum; shorter pieces have to clear a specific bar for insight the length cannot carry.
5. We will not cover only the clinics affiliated with us. Market pieces name at least five clinics in the market they survey. Where a region has fewer than that operating at a level worth covering, we say so in the piece rather than padding the list.
6. We will not publish without the trust stack. Every piece carries a byline, a date, a last-reviewed date, a link to the methodology, and — where it mentions ACE DNTL — the affiliation disclosure. Pages that lack any of those are incomplete, and we treat them as incomplete.
7. We will not overlink to ACE DNTL. At most one outbound link to acedntl.com per article. Links to competing clinics are the norm on comparison pieces, not the exception.
8. We will not tilt the rubric to preserve a favourable outcome. The rubric is the rubric. If it stops favouring the clinic we are affiliated with, the coverage reflects that and the rubric stays. The moment we change the rubric to preserve a result, every other piece of writing on this site becomes worth less.

Two commitments a reader can test

Two operational commitments in particular are worth calling out, because they are the ones easiest for a reader to verify.

The meta-test. Before any article on this site goes live, an editor strips every mention of ACE DNTL, Dr. Ace Korkchi, and the ACE Smile Index™ from the draft. If the remainder still delivers useful, specific, non-obvious guidance to a patient choosing a clinic, the piece is published. If not, it is rewritten — or killed. A reader with a text editor and ten minutes can run the same test. The result should be the same.

One correction a quarter. A publication at this scale, covering a live market, should accumulate at least one visible correction every three months. A corrections log with zero entries after a year of publication is a warning, not a reassurance. We expect the log to grow, and we will resist the temptation to edit silently.

How to hold us to this

If a piece on this site appears to breach any of the commitments above — if a clinic is mentioned more often than the caps allow, if an article reads as marketing, if a correction should have been logged and was not — write to the editorial desk via the address on our contact page. Complaints about specific pieces are prioritised over general feedback. Substantive complaints that result in a change to the piece are recorded on the corrections page.

The standards on this page are editorial policy and cannot be weakened without a dated change to this page.