About
This site grades probiotics marketed to men at the level the evidence actually exists in — the named strain — and then opens the bottles on the shelf to check whether the thing they name is the thing that was studied. It sells nothing, and it publishes the answers that are bad for it.
What it is
One audit, frozen and dated. 167 currently-sold US products were identified and URL-verified and 166 carry a published page; 27 were taken apart at label level against the printed Supplement Facts panel, the brand’s own live page and the NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database, including superseded label versions. Those 27 labels name 294 organisms between them. Every product-level percentage on this site divides by 27 and every strain-level percentage divides by 294, and each page says which. The methodology sets out how each grade was produced.
The unit is the strain, not the species and not the brand, because that is the unit the trials were run in — and the unit the FTC’s own substantiation standard uses. Where a label names a species and no designator, there is nothing to grade, and this site says so rather than grading the species and hoping.
Ranked on disclosure only, with ties left tied. There is no top ten and no “editor’s pick”; the order is what a label discloses and what of it survives checking, never what a brand paid or how a product performed. Where the honest answer to “which one should I buy” is “none of these, for that reason”, that is the answer printed.
Who runs it
Roman Sydorenko — Independent analyst and operator of this site. His work is record-checking — resolving strain designators to published records, chasing certifications to the issuer’s own register, and testing whether a published number survives being looked up. Not a clinician; every clinical claim here is sourced to a named trial, guideline or regulator record you can open yourself.
In law that is Roman Sydorenko, autónomo (self-employed individual), registered in Spain. Autónomo is Spain’s legal form for a registered self-employed trader — a named party, under a named legal system, and the party a correction, a complaint or a dispute goes to.
He also runs an independent SEO consultancy, which is the unrelated work that pays for this. That is a relevant interest and it is disclosed rather than buried: someone who earns a living from search visibility has an obvious incentive to make a site look authoritative. The answer offered here is not a promise of good character. It is that every number carries the record it came from, so you never have to take one on trust. The author page sets that background out in full and says where it stops, and the funding page says what this site does not take.
Three commitments that cost something
A commitment that costs nothing is a slogan. These three are the ones that are expensive, and they are the ones to hold this site to.
1. It publishes null results
Including its own. For the reasons probiotics are actually sold to men — testosterone, prostate, erections, “the male microbiome” — nothing qualifies at strain level, and that is the headline on the front page of a site whose domain name is an argument for the opposite. Null findings are not filler here: no outcome anywhere reaches Grade A, and zero trials have ever shown a probiotic benefit larger in men than in women. Where a search found nothing, the page publishes the absence together with the databases actually searched, because an unscoped “zero” is a claim about the world when it is really a claim about one query.
2. It names products
The audit is brand-named at the level of the individual SKU: the label transcribed as printed, the CFU basis quoted or recorded as missing, each strain designator resolved to a published record or reported as resolving to none, each certification checked at the certifier’s own register rather than at the badge. Anonymised audits are safe and useless. Naming is where the exposure is, and it is also the only version worth reading — so the same rule runs the other way: where a brand discloses more than its competitors, that is stated too, by name.
3. It publishes corrections against itself
Corrections here are dated, permanent, and quote the original error in full. Nothing is silently edited, including by us. That policy is not aspirational — it is already how this project’s own drafts were treated: before a word of it was published, the research went through adversarial passes whose job was to break it, re-running the queries and re-checking every register against what the draft claimed it held. What those passes caught never reached a reader, so it is not in the corrections log; what reaches a reader and turns out to be wrong is. The author page sets out how the work is checked.
Where this stops
- Not medical advice. Nobody here is your doctor, and a urological symptom is a diagnostic problem that needs a clinician, not a capsule — the full notice is on the disclosures page.
- Not clinically reviewed. No clinician has reviewed this site. If one ever does, their name, their credential as it appears on the issuing register, and the date of the review will be published on the pages they reviewed. What a reviewer would be asked to check, and what would be published when one signs.
What pays for this, and what does not
There is no revenue on this site today, from any source. That is stated in the footer of every page rather than behind a link, because under the FTC’s rule on consumer reviews a disclosure is not clear and conspicuous if you have to click to see it.
This site takes no product, samples, early access, review units or payment from any manufacturer or retailer, and none has ever been accepted. This is a documentary audit — labels, the NIH label database, issuer registers, archived brand pages and the published literature — so every finding here is reproducible by anyone with a browser. No product was purchased, opened, weighed or cultured, and nothing on this site verifies that a bottle’s contents match the label printed on it. Every cell we could not verify is published as unverified rather than deleted. Every correction is permanent and quotes the original error. If any of that changes, it is dated in the corrections log before it takes effect.
If that ever changes, the change is announced before it takes effect, not discovered afterwards: the footer line changes first, the change is dated in the corrections log, and the funding page names who pays, for what, and on which pages — in plain text on every page that carries it. Some arrangements cannot be cured by disclosure at all — selling position in a ranking is deceptive under FTC rules whatever it is labelled — and the funding page names them.
Tell us we are wrong
Corrections from anyone are published on the same terms, including from a brand whose product is audited here. Absence statements — “zero”, “never”, “no trial exists” — are the most perishable claims on this site and the first place to look. Send one to roman@seobro.com. The corrections policy sets out how one is published.