How we judge whether a robot fits

The fit rules

• A hard limit your house exceeds excludes the unit. Lawn area, slope, pool length, pool type, cat weight, cat count, threshold height, litter type, a boundary wire when you said no wire, a wanted mop when there is none.
• Within 10% of a hard limit is “fits, at a limit”. Makers rate area and slope under their own conditions; a house at the edge of the rating is a house that will find out.
• A wanted feature the unit lacks is “at a limit”, not excluded: wall climbing, cordless, a self-emptying dock, multi-zone mowing, an anti-tangle brush in a pet home, a mop that lifts over carpet.
• A limit the maker does not publish makes the verdict “unknown”, never “fits”.

The same rules run in your browser on every guide (“Adjust to your house”) and at build time; parity tests hold the two to the same answers.

How we decide a fact is solid

• A limit is recorded only when it appears on the maker’s product page, spec sheet, FAQ or manual, with the URL and the verbatim sentence stored beside it. A checker re-fetches every source and looks for the sentence; a fact it cannot find again is never rendered.
• Figures seen only in a listing, a search snippet or a review are not recorded as specs. Tester measurements are shown separately, named and linked.
• We do not borrow a figure from a sibling model. A missing field stays missing.
• We do not test units ourselves, and every page says so.

Currently 63 units and 608 cited limits.

What we will never rank

A unit whose model or its family appears in a CPSC recall is shown for research but never picked and never linked until the maker’s remedy is documented.

How the site makes money

Amazon affiliate links, disclosed above the first link on every page. The picks come from the rules above; a commission cannot move a unit past a limit it misses. The disclosure.