How WhatDrink builds and validates drink information

The guidance on the site is assembled from a few kinds of source:

• • Structured recipe records
• • Normalized ingredients and components
• • Reviewed reference mappings between drinks and their attributes
• • Public venue information, including official venue websites
• • Google Places fields, where applicable
• • Manual corrections
• • Approved reference data

We do not claim sources we do not use. If a fact cannot be traced to one of these, it does not appear.

Every specific claim on the site follows the same evidence rule:

• • Derive facts through calculations over real, structured data.
• • Extract facts from identifiable source evidence.
• • Use generated text only for supported interpretation and wording.
• • Never fabricate missing specifics.
• • Omit the claim when the evidence is insufficient.

AI-assisted wording helps present what the data and sources already support — the wording itself is never a source of fact. A number, a pairing, or a classification only appears when real data or a cited source backs it; otherwise we leave it out.

Objective operations are handled in code, the same way every time. This includes:

• • Identifier resolution
• • Slug validation
• • Component matching
• • Normalization
• • Metric calculation
• • Filtering
• • Deduplication
• • Output caps
• • Route validation
• • Rejecting unsupported values

AI may help with judgement-heavy or wording tasks, such as:

• • Summarization
• • Classification judgement
• • Interpreting candidate information
• • Editorial wording

To be clear about the guardrails:

In other words, AI helps organise and phrase — it does not decide, unchecked, what is true. Not every page is individually written by a person, but every published page is constrained by approved data and validation.

When we rank drinks or compare them, we combine a handful of objective signals rather than a single score. Depending on the guide, that can include:

• • Numeric threshold filtering
• • Balanced trade-off scoring
• • Ingredient and component inclusion
• • Base-spirit classification
• • Normalized flavour matching
• • Nutrition comparisons
• • Alcohol-strength comparisons
• • Ingredient-count comparisons
• • Data-completeness handling

The aim is to surface useful trade-offs — lighter versus stronger, simpler versus more complex — not to declare a single "best" drink.

This page is the site-wide view. See how individual WhatDrink decision guides are ranked and evaluated, including the nutrition, ABV and confidence-level detail behind the drink-guide system.

Recommendations such as "similar drinks" or "try next" follow a reviewed pipeline. Generated candidates are never published automatically:

For the specifics of how these figures are derived, see how WhatDrink calculates cocktail nutrition and strength.

Internal links only point to resolved, supported public routes. If a recommendation would link to a page that does not exist or is not published, we suppress the link rather than send you to a dead end.

If you spot something wrong, our corrections page explains how to tell us, and data updates records material changes we have made.