Why Trust GoodBed
Tough Questions Deserve Straightforward Answers

We aren't naturally boastful, but we simply can't be shy about letting you know that GoodBed is by far the most trustworthy source of mattress information on the market.

The internet today is riddled with bad information about mattresses – fake reviews, spam-filled forums, bogus "best mattress" lists, etc. Even Google can't seem to tell the difference between real mattress experts and fake ones, which is why large publications who are trusted in one area (eg, finance, news, college rankings, computers, etc.) can so easily trick Google into thinking that they also know something about mattresses.

Fortunately, savvy consumers are starting to question the information they see on Google, Reddit, YouTube, and elsewhere. As such, we completely understand – and even appreciate it – when they turn a skeptical eye toward us as well. Whenever we receive a tough question, we respond clearly and honestly. In most cases, these penetrating questions get answered personally by Mike Magnuson, our founder. Any time we think his/our response might be helpful to other skeptical shoppers, we post it here.

More generally, if there is anything at all that gives you concern about GoodBed's trustworthiness, we welcome you to ask us about it. We sincerely appreciate the difficulty that consumers face in knowing who to trust, and feel extremely confident that the more informed you are, the more you'll value the work we do here at GoodBed. Our steadfast commitment to integrity has not been without its costs, but one incredibly important benefit is that it allows us to address these types of concerns with radical candor and transparency.

Do you receive money from any mattress brand?

Yes. As a marketplace, GoodBed publishes links to products offered for sale at hundreds of different retailers. When you purchase a product using one of the links or promotions shown on this site, GoodBed often (but not always) receives a referral fee. This comes to us at no cost to you (the consumer), and in most cases even results in extra savings for you.

A good analog for GoodBed's business model is Kayak. As a marketplace for hotels, Kayak receives money from every hotel listed on their site. Does that business model compromise Kayak's trustworthiness as a source of information about hotels? Of course not. Like GoodBed, Kayak is free to consumers, so could not exist without revenue from its marketplace participants. But by covering the vast majority of the market, giving equal treatment to all marketplace participants, and presenting information factually and transparently, both GoodBed and Kayak are able to serve consumers with the utmost integrity while maintaining a revenue stream that funds their operations.

Along these lines, an important way that GoodBed differs from any other source of mattress information is the unique breadth of our business relationships. GoodBed currently works with nearly all major mattress brands, as well as hundreds of local stores across the country. This diversification allows us to remain both brand-agnostic and channel-agnostic, and prevents any one of our business relationships from having influence over the reviews, ratings, or opinions that we provide. Without the pressure to favor a single channel (eg, online brands) or a limited group of advertisers, it remains in the best interest of our business to focus first and foremost on what we have always done – helping our readers find the best products and stores for them. 

Where do you get all your test beds? Are they given to you for free or do you buy them yourself? If the latter, does someone provide them to you at a discounted rate?

The beds we test are provided to us by the brands upon our request. The face-value implication of this question is that getting a "free mattress" constitutes a non-cash payment from the brand. This would certainly be true of a blogger or Instagram influencer who does a mattress review as a one-off. In my case though, what am I going to do with one more mattress? I only have one mattress in my bedroom... Once we've tested a mattress, I have no further use for it – and by that point, we've generally destroyed it anyway. So for us, receiving a mattress is not a payment – it actually creates significant expense for us to test it, store it, and then eventually donate, recycle, or dispose of it.

Does your access to brands or products depend on posting positive reviews?

The answer here is a definitive no. Brands recognize that our review will be candid and objective, and that none of our reviews will shower their product with universal praise. They provide an objective expert explanation, not a sales pitch. It's hard to single out a specific example of this, since it's true of every review we've ever done. But perhaps a noteworthy example is our review of the original Purple mattress, since in its day this was by far the best-selling and most highly-touted mattress on the market. As always, we provided a comprehensive, objective, expert assessment:

• Here are our ratings for this mattress: https://www.goodbed.com/mattress-model/the-purple-bed/

• Here is the in-depth video review we published at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjXViaBCEoA

So why does a brand provide products to us? First, we are (by necessity) highly selective in which products we cover, since our review process is extremely in-depth and time-consuming. Products that merit our attention are chosen based on interest from our readers, as well as their overall significance in the market. In that sense, our choice to review a product is in itself a positive reflection on the brand. In addition, for many of our readers, there is no substitute for our opinion and explanation, meaning our review is a valuable opportunity for a brand to attract those customers. And not least of all, I also think that good brands value our integrity and the very unique work we do. They recognize that in the long run, increasing transparency helps consumers choose better products, and in that way gives companies credit for making and selling such products. This virtuous cycle, which ultimately leads to better and better products being available, has always been the ultimate impact that I want GoodBed to have on the mattress industry.

Net, in the 15+ years since I started this company, no brand has ever declined the opportunity to have their product reviewed by us. If that were to ever happen, it would be a very conspicuous choice, and we would be obligated to let our readers know that they were uncomfortable having their product tested by us.

Do you sell data to any companies, especially from your quiz?

We have never sold any data from our site, whether from the quiz or otherwise. Likewise, we never sell our reader info, or allow companies to contact our readers. We value our readers, and they are not for sale.

Does your site intentionally leave out the customer ratings for brands you favor, or ones that sponsor you? Why do many options recommended in your quiz say 'N/A' for their review score, even when they're very popular?

First and foremost, data from customer reviews is always shown exactly the same way for all brands and products, according to exactly the same rules. There is no favoritism for or against any brands in how our customer review data is displayed.

We absolutely do list the customer review scores whenever we have them. However, there are simply many mattress models for which we haven't received enough customer feedback to generate a rating. We need at least 10 reviews for that specific model in order to calculate a customer rating for it (which we call a "model rating"). If we haven't received enough customer reviews of a given product to calculate a rating for it yet, we show "N/A". 

If this is happening for a product that seems popular and well-established, it may be because the manufacturer made changes to the materials or construction of that product that we deemed to be significant. In this case, even if the name of the product is unchanged, we feel it is misleading to carry forward the old reviews to the new version, so we create a new version and start over from zero in collecting reviews of that version. On top of this, a review for the Firm version doesn't count for the Medium version, etc.

As a result of these policies, many mattress models (most, in fact) never reach the point where we are able to calculate a model rating for them. This is unfortunate, but it is a conscious trade-off we make to ensure that the model ratings we do show are real and relevant. As you may know, in most other places you see mattress reviews (eg, brand websites, Amazon, etc.), they are including reviews of the old version without disclosing that the mattress reviewed by this customer is not the same as the one you are able to buy today. Typically, they will also aggregate reviews of all comfort levels in order to show higher review totals. We could easily adopt these practices as well, but our readers have told us that they find them misleading and confusing. So we don't.

That said, we do see some value in the aggregated reviews, as long as they are labeled appropriately. We call this a "brand rating." Naturally, when you are aggregating reviews for multiple models, and allowing those reviews to accumulate for different versions of these models over time, it is much easier to reach a critical mass of reviews. So our success rate on being able to calculate ratings for brands is much higher than our ability to calculate ratings for models.

Getting back to your quiz results, when you see "N/A" for the model rating, it's not because we're leaving out the model rating, it's because we don't have one. And when you click the link below it to "See x brand ratings," what you are getting is the parent brand rating. Basically, our view is that the model rating is relevant enough to be shown directly in your quiz results, while the brand rating is not. However, if we don't have a model rating, we do at least include a link to where you can see the brand rating. What we don't do is mix model ratings and brand ratings by showing you model ratings when they are available and brand ratings when they are not. We stopped doing this because we don't want to create a false equivalency between a model rating and a brand rating, and our readers didn't seem to understand the difference between them when they were listed side by side.

Why do you promote brands that you do?

Actually we don't "promote" any brands anywhere on our site. The closest thing we do is promote discounts or money-saving opportunities that we think are particularly valuable for our readers. Other than that, the only thing you may be confusing for "promotion" are the 16 brands listed on our home page and/or the brands shown in our header. In both cases, these brands are chosen strictly based on interest from our readers. Regardless of what people here may think about these products, these are the brands that our readers are most interested in learning about. Since many brands have asked us how they can be listed there, I do realize that this can be misconstrued as "promotion." However, there is no way for a brand to buy their way onto our home page or header.

How can you know that the free beds you are getting are the same quality as the ones found in the store?

I can certainly appreciate this concern and have thought much about it myself. In the car industry, there have been similar suspicions that the fleet of press vehicles provided to reviewers like Car & Driver, MotorTrend, and Edmunds may be souped up relative to normal cars. Certainly those cars are closely scrutinized before being handed off to the journalists.

In our case though, this would be extremely difficult to do, would have limited upside, would have material risk and downside, and appears to be extremely unlikely based on empirical evidence. Here are some more specific reasons I can be confident that this type of thing isn't happening:

1. Mattresses are much harder to "tinker" with than most products. A chef can pick out the freshest vegetables they have on-hand. A car company can swap in a tire with stickier rubber. But Stearns & Foster doesn't have a "better" coil unit lying around than the one they already use.

2. If this were a common practice with mattresses, we (and you) would already have clear evidence of it. Any tinkering to a press car can easily be done after it rolls off the production line, meaning it can be contained to the PR team and other key insiders. But in order to tinker with a mattress, it would have be done during the production process (before it gets glued, stitched, sewn shut, etc.). This means the normal assembly line would need to be interrupted in order to swap in a different foam, different spring unit, different fabric, different thread, etc. I've been to some of these factories so I know how disruptive this would be. In essence, the whole manufacturing staff would need to be complicit. There would be no way to keep these practices a secret.

3. If a mattress company did try to soup up their test product, there's a very good chance we would spot it. If a car company adds a special sound dampener somewhere deep in the engine, that could materially improve the engine noise without being obvious to the reviewer. But mattress construction is much simpler, and we are very familiar with the components they use. So if the insides of the mattress were materially different than what is advertised, we would notice that when we cut it open, and point it out in our review. That said, it's worth noting that this probably wouldn't happen with other mattress reviewers, most of whom don't have nearly the level of expertise required to do this, and are more focused on selling you the product anyway. One of the many ways GoodBed is different is that we care about the materials and components, discuss them in-depth, and even list the layers on our site.

4. Mattress metrics are much less discrete and harder to game than most products. A car company can swap in different brake pads so that the vehicle records a better stopping distance without negatively affecting any other aspect of the car's performance. But mattress features tend to be much more inter-related, and on many dimensions we measure its performance relative to a specific type of sleeper. For example, let's say you tried to swap in a more robust coil unit in order to make a product test better for heavier people, or stomach sleepers. That same change would likely make that product test worse for lighter people and/or side sleepers.

5. If PR teams had any control over the mattresses we receive, the ones we receive would look a lot better. With press cars, a lot of care is taken to make sure the car is in perfect visual condition. Any components that are found to have blemishes are replaced. And of course the car is freshly washed, vacuumed, and detailed before being delivered to the journalist. In our case, most mattresses we receive have trivial, but obvious, aesthetic flaws. For example, we will immediately notice a long string hanging off of a stitch, or a bit of lint on the cover. Typically, these flaws have no functional consequence whatsoever, so we simply take care of them and don't feel a need to mention them in our review. But if a PR team had been involved in any way whatsoever, the bare minimum they would have done is to give the mattress a visual inspection before it was sent to us, at which time they would have certainly seen and addressed these types of things themselves.

6. Our mattress orders generally come through the normal fulfillment process.When we request a mattress, our contact typically places the order for us using the same online system that a normal consumer would use. We then receive an immediate email order confirmation that is exactly the same as if we'd placed the order ourselves on the company's website. From there, we get all the usual shipping notifications, and the mattress arrives on the usual customer timeline. If our mattress was coming from a different pool, it would be highly unlikely that the manufacturer would do it this way.

Why do you show only 3 options in your quiz results? Doesn't that skew the results in favor of certain select brands?

The whole point of the quiz is to help you narrow your options. That's why we show you the 3 best matches, which most of our readers have told is the right number of options for them. That said, we fully appreciate that some people want more choices, which is why every quiz result also includes a link to "Show more results". Clicking this link will allow you to see many (as in, hundreds) more options, along with your match score for each of them. These options will be sorted by your match score from highest to lowest, and can be filtered numerous ways from there (eg, by price, softness, features, etc.).

Many brands have been criticized for downgrading their foam quality over the years. Why don't you talk about this in your reviews when this happens?

In general, our philosophy is that the current version of any given product is the only one that a consumer can actually buy, so our assessment of that version is the thing that really matters. As such, to the extent we have any concerns with the current version, we certainly express those in our review. More generally, we discuss many aspects of foam quality in our reviews, and also list the layers of each product on our site, along with standardized classifications of foam density – SD (no label) vs HD vs UHD. For a representative example, I would recommend watching the 10 minutes of this review starting at 19:14, in which we go into extensive detail about every aspect of the foams used in that mattress, their densities, and many different aspects of their performance.

In addition, there are other situations where we may deem that historical context is relevant to provide. For example, if we feel that there is a widespread perception of a brand's quality that is no longer accurate due to changes in its materials or construction, we will certainly bring this to the attention of our readers.

Beyond these types of cases, it's accurate to say that comparing the current version of a product to previous versions from that brand is not a major focus of our reviews. The extremely in-depth nature of our assessments makes our articles and videos quite long as it is, and people aren't generally reading or watching them for a history lesson.