How to tell a Spreadsheet site is still being kept up

Reference sites like this one are easy to publish and easy to abandon. A handful of signals separate one that is still maintained from one that is a single snapshot with a publish date on it and nothing since.

None of these signals guarantee accuracy on their own, but their absence is a real warning: a site with no dated changes, dead outbound links, and numbers with no source is not necessarily wrong, but it has given you no way to check.

A dated change log is the single most reliable signal, because it costs real, ongoing effort to maintain. A static “last updated” stamp at the top of a page costs nothing to edit and proves nothing on its own; a log that lists specific, dated changes, a policy date that shifted, a new fact that was added, a figure that was corrected, shows actual maintenance rather than a cosmetic timestamp.

Sourced numbers are the second: a shipping estimate, a fee rate, or an exchange rate that links back to the specific page it came from, with the date it was read, can be checked against the live source in under a minute. A number with no citation is either the author's own guess or a fact that has since changed without anyone noticing.

A working outbound link is the simplest to test and the easiest to overlook. A reference site with several category or agent links that bounce to a dead page or an unrelated redirect is a site nobody has actually clicked through recently, which raises the odds that nothing else on it has been checked recently either.

Finally, a named ranking with no methodology attached, a “best agent” badge, a star rating with no stated criteria, is worth treating as marketing rather than research. A genuine comparison names what it is comparing on and why, and says plainly where the data runs out.

Held against its own list: this build was assembled on October 22, 2026, from GuaBase pages captured on October 21 and 22, 2026, with the specific page and capture date noted next to each sourced claim rather than left as an unattributed number.

Every outbound link, to GuaBase's own site and to the product Spreadsheet, was tested for a working response before this page went live, rather than assumed from a URL pattern. The Updates page carries a short, dated change log rather than a single “last updated” stamp with no detail behind it.

Where GuaBase's own pages disagree with each other, the 1688 support question and the warehouse-location mock timeline are the two found during this build, that disagreement is stated directly on the FAQ and glossary pages rather than silently resolved in one direction.

This page also does not rank GuaBase against named competitors anywhere on this site. The Other Shopping Agents page explains why directly: this site has not verified another agent's facts to the same standard it holds GuaBase to, so publishing a ranking would fail its own test above.

One honest gap: this site cannot check its own “working outbound link” signal continuously. Links were tested at build time, October 22, 2026; a link that breaks on GuaBase's side after that date will not self-correct here until the next review. That limitation applies to any static reference site, not just this one, and it is part of why a dated change log matters more than a one-time accuracy claim.