How We Review Pet Insurance

Every comparison, review and cost page on PetAssured.ca follows the same process. We publish it here so you can judge our work — and so insurers can hold us accountable when we get something wrong.

It includes the part most methodology pages leave out: what this method cannot tell you.

What we evaluate

For every provider, seven dimensions:

1. Coverage scope — which conditions, treatments and procedures are eligible, and which are carved out
2. Reimbursement structure — the percentage paid back, and whether caps are per-incident, annual or absent
3. Deductible mechanics — annual versus per-condition, and how it resets. This one compounds: across a chronic illness the two structures produce very different lifetime numbers
4. Exclusions — pre-existing definitions, bilateral clauses, breed-specific carve-outs, age limits
5. Waiting periods — how long before coverage activates, and which conditions carry longer ones
6. Claim experience — payout speed, and whether direct vet pay exists, which decides whether you float a five-figure bill yourself
7. Canadian availability — provinces served, regulatory standing, support hours

We weight these by what decides a claim, not by what is easy to compare. The monthly premium is the most visible number and among the least predictive of whether you will actually be paid.

How we verify a provider

• We read the published policy wording document, not the marketing page. The two frequently disagree, and only one of them is binding.
• We test each provider's online quote flow with multiple breed and age combinations.
• We cross-reference complaints filed with the General Insurance OmbudService and provincial regulators.
• We re-verify quarterly. Every page shows the date we last did so — if that date looks old, treat the page as stale and tell us.

How we source cost figures

Every dollar figure on a vet-cost page is an estimate for planning, not a quote, and every page carrying figures also carries a "how we estimated these costs" block naming the sources behind them.

As of this review the site carries 284 citations across 82 external domains. Ranges are cross-checked against the individual procedure guides elsewhere on the site, so a number quoted on a hub matches the page that works it out in detail.

Two things we will not do:

• We do not publish a figure we cannot source. A page that cites nothing should claim nothing.
• We do not present American pricing as Canadian. That one is enforced mechanically rather than by good intentions — see below.

How we label non-Canadian data

Canadian veterinary pricing is not comprehensively published. Where the best available figure for a procedure comes from a non-Canadian source, we use it and say so inside the citation, in these words:

(US source, not adjusted to Canadian pricing)

76 pages currently carry that label, 38 in English and 38 in French — an exact pair for every one. We would rather show you an honestly-labelled American figure than a Canadian-sounding number we made up.

This is a build rule, not a promise. Our automated audit fails the build when a citation makes a Canadian price claim without either linking to a Canadian source or carrying an explicit non-Canadian marker. A US figure cannot be quietly passed off as Canadian here, because the check runs before anything ships.

Replacing those citations with Canadian primary sources — provincial veterinary association fee guides, Statistics Canada, Canadian clinic price lists — is ongoing work. The labels stay until it is finished.

What is checked automatically

Editorial standards that rely on someone remembering them decay. These run by script on every change, before it can go live:

• Titles and meta descriptions — length, uniqueness, no duplicates
• One H1 per page, no skipped heading levels, valid structured data
• No internal links to redirects or dead pages, no orphan pages, crawl depth capped at four
• Canonical, og:url and hreflang consistency, including English/French reciprocity
• Thin-content and near-duplicate detection across the whole site
• The provenance rule above, and the product rule below

How we stay independent

PetAssured.ca earns nothing from insurers. There are no pet-insurance affiliate links here — no quote buttons, no tracking URLs, no commercial relationship with any provider we review. The only affiliate programme we hold is Amazon, used for equipment on some cost pages. To keep the rankings honest:

• No paid placements. No insurer can buy a better ranking, a "featured" badge, or inclusion in a best-of list.
• Rankings cannot be bought, because nothing is for sale. No provider pays us anything, so a ranking has no commercial consequence for us either way.
• No editorial review by insurers. We do not send drafts to insurers for approval before publishing.
• Every affiliate link is disclosed on the page where it appears.
• We link no product that claims to treat, prevent or cure anything. Equipment only — beds, ramps, harnesses, scales. No supplements, remedies or ingestibles, whatever the commission. We are not veterinarians, the efficacy claim is not ours to make, and an ingestible is the one purchase an owner might substitute for actual veterinary care.
• Corrections are public. When we get something wrong we fix it on the page and update the review date.

The limits of this method

Worth stating plainly, because a methodology that claims no weaknesses is not a methodology:

• We do not have insurers' claims data. We can read what a policy says it will pay. We cannot audit what a company actually paid across thousands of real claims, because that data is not published. Where we describe claim experience it comes from policy wording, public complaint records and reader reports — not from the insurer's books.
• Our cost figures are compiled estimates, not a survey. We have not phoned two hundred Canadian clinics and built a price index. The ranges are aggregated from published sources and cross-checked, and they will not match your clinic exactly.
• Veterinary fees are unregulated in Canada. Two clinics on the same street can charge very differently for the same procedure. Any national range is a planning tool, not a prediction.
• We are researchers, not clinicians. We can tell you what something typically costs and whether a policy is likely to pay for it. We cannot tell you whether your animal needs it.

What we are not

We are not licensed insurance brokers, agents or financial advisors, and we are not veterinarians. Everything here is editorial — comparative analysis built on public policy documents and our own research. For a binding quote or licensed advice specific to your situation, contact the insurer directly or speak to a licensed broker in your province. For medical advice, speak to your vet.

Found an error?

Email hi@petassured.ca with the page URL and what you would like us to verify. We respond to every correction request within five business days, and corrections are reflected on the page with an updated review date.