Who writes GuitarBomb
Every article carries a real byline linking to a real person. There are no house pseudonyms, no "GuitarBomb Staff", and no ghost-written filler. You can see what any writer has covered, and their background, on their author profile.
GuitarBomb was founded and is edited by Jef Stone, a working guitarist. The site's opinions are the opinions of the people whose names are on the articles.
How we review gear
Reviews are based on hands-on time with the gear. Where an article is a first look, a news piece or a spec round-up rather than a full review, we say so in the article — we don't dress up a press release as a verdict.
Nobody buys a score. We don't accept payment, gifts or advertising in exchange for coverage, a review, or a particular rating, and no manufacturer or retailer gets to see or approve a review before it runs. If a product is bad, we say it is — the affiliate commission is the same either way.
Where an article carries a score, the number and the written verdict come from the reviewer, not from a formula and not from a manufacturer's claims.
How we make money
GuitarBomb is funded by affiliate commission. Some links to retailers — including Amazon, Andertons, Thomann, Sweetwater, Gear4Music, Reverb and others — earn us a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Affiliate links are marked on every article that carries them, and every one is tagged so search engines can see it's a paid link. What we choose to cover, and what we say about it, is decided before any commission is.
Prices and deals
Prices shown next to a product are fetched automatically from the retailer's own page and stamped with the date they were last checked, which we print beside the price. Gear prices move constantly, so if a price hasn't been confirmed in the last 21 days we hide the number and say it may have changed rather than show you a figure we can't stand behind.
We don't display Amazon prices at all. We have no licensed feed for them, so any number we showed would be one we couldn't keep current — the link goes straight to the product instead.
Deal posts are time-sensitive by nature. An older deal article is a record of a deal that ran, not a promise that it's still live.
How we use AI
AI does not write GuitarBomb articles. The reporting, the writing, the opinions, the review verdicts and the scores are all produced by the human whose name is on the piece. We don't publish machine-written articles, and we don't pad the site with generated filler.
We do use an AI assistant for a defined set of supporting tasks:
- drafting the search-result summary and the short "quick take" that sits at the top of some articles;
- drafting FAQ entries, spec tables and pros/cons lists — built only from details the article itself already states, never from the model's own knowledge of the product;
- writing image descriptions (alt text) so the site works for readers using a screen reader;
- suggesting tags, related articles and social posts.
All of it is a draft. An editor reads and edits what the assistant produces before an article goes live; where we refresh this metadata on an article that's already published, the editor reviews it immediately afterwards. Nothing the assistant writes is treated as fact-checked, and it is explicitly instructed never to invent a spec, price, score or claim that isn't in the article already.
The reason we use it at all is that it does the repetitive structural work — summaries, alt text, tagging — that would otherwise eat the time we'd rather spend playing the gear and writing about it.
Corrections and updates
We get things wrong sometimes. When we do, we fix the article rather than quietly delete it, and a substantive change is marked with an "Updated" flag and a revised date so you can see the piece has moved on since publication.
If you've spotted an error, a dead link or a price that's wrong, please tell us — corrections from readers are welcome and we'd rather know.
Comments and discussion
We don't run comments on the site. Discussion happens on r/GuitarBomb, and many articles link straight to their own thread.
Get in touch
Questions about anything on this page, a correction, or a story tip — the contact form reaches the editor directly.