Two weeks ago, I had what I can only describe as a punch-to-the-stomach moment (which luckily doesn’t happen very often). The AirGradient ONE - our monitor that was recognized in one of the world’s most rigorous scientific evaluations - suddenly became “Not Recommended” by WIRED magazine in their The Best Indoor Air Quality Monitors review.
I just published above and want to say that I’m really hoping we can initiate a constructive and fruitful discussion around the topic of tech review quality and hopefully contribute to some improvements.
For this it would be really helpful if you could also participate in the survey below to understand better how our community evaluates products that they are interested to get.
BTW: If you participate, you can actually win one of two of the ‘Not Recommended’ monitors 
Based on my 7 years experience in building and using low cost sensors, i can mention that AIRGRADIENT sensors are the best low cost sensors i have work with. They are very easy to configure, easy to deploy and easy to access data. Thank you AIRGRADIENT for offering your product to build smart city projects, monitoring schools , hospitals and offices and making invisible visible.
We already got more than 50 interesting comments in our survey. I share some of them here:
A lot of big names these days just aren’t very good at reviewing products, better as showcases and ignored opinions, in mine. Good, technically-competent friends and dedicated communities are the best resources, with some review sites and youtubers doing decent work.
This is a problem that needs open discussion, kudos for bringing up this subject; the trustworthiness of online information is becoming more and more diluted it seems on a daily basis.
Very much appreciate your honest and transparent reaction to the WIRED review.
Any review from a magazine like Wired you should likely expect something nefarious going on in the reviews.
You sensors are the best low cost sensors from the market!
But it’s that way everywhere – tech toys, cameras, cooking tools. It’s getting harder and harder to separate the noise from the signal. And companies love that – their marketing departments capitalize on it. I wish I had a better answer to this problem.
I generally trust WIRED’s news reporting, but I’ve never used them for product reviews. I will often look for reviews online (including Reddit, HN, and retail reviews), but I take any individual review with a major grain of salt: a trend is interesting, a bad experience here or there isn’t. I take word of mouth very seriously, and people in my group do seem to appreciate the AirGradient sensors. Price is an important factor to me, but I am willing to pay to an extent for better quality or more open hardware.
There’s so much out there that’s biased slop (cough Verge cough Wired). Now in 2025, we have to worry about AI slop (cough every google search anymore).
I always trust opensource and more “open” products. And repairabilty is a huge factor. It show confidence in the product.
Most reviews online are flawed biased or ad and AI ridden garbage these days. I try to get the widest range of coverage possible and then look deeper into the outlying views to work out what they were doing differently.
I just wanted to echo what everyone is saying. I will not call the Air Gradient cheap as I bought it to monitor my house indoor/outdoor AQ to help manage my kids asthma but it is for sure very cost effective and efficient.
In the games industry you can see how outlets basically promote games based on ideology or other bias, tech is sadly going down the same path.
It’s shameful that an outlet like Wired puts out such a silly reason to demote a product with zero comment section… It’s as if the reviewer woke up and decided she will go from reviewing dog trackers to air quality sensors - she clearly has no idea and yet here we are.
I hope this gets rectified with apologies very quickly and that former Air Gradient reviewers put out videos denouncing this practice
My Experience with the AirGradient ONE – A Personal Perspective
Despite Wired’s “Not Recommended” verdict—based on display durability concerns—I’ve had an entirely different experience with the AirGradient ONE.
From the start, I found it easy to assemble, install, and configure. The user-friendly instructions and open-source ecosystem made setup straightforward, even for someone without a technical background. The monitor was up and running within minutes, and the integration with Home Assistant worked flawlessly.
In my case, the device has performed reliably and consistently. The OLED display, indicator lights, and sensor readings (CO₂, PM₂.₅, VOCs, NOₓ) have remained accurate and stable. I’ve never experienced the screen issues mentioned by Wired.
More importantly, I’m currently using the AirGradient ONE in educational settings, where students can engage with real-time air quality data. It’s a powerful tool for raising awareness and promoting environmental responsibility in schools. Its affordability, reliability, and transparency make it an ideal fit for both classrooms and community projects.
Too often, corporate pressure in mainstream media and social networks creates confusion in the community, and we deal with fake news in many aspects of our lives. Our antidote to misinformation is firsthand user experience and always having reliable sources at hand. That’s why I believe it’s essential to share positive, real-world experiences like mine.
Far from Wired’s assessment, my experience with the AirGradient ONE has been overwhelmingly positive.
Hi Achim, just wanted to share my sympathies. I saw that article and it’s frankly ridiculous. There are so many influencer-type reviewers out there, who review technical products from a lifestyle perspective. It’s unfortunately extremely common in the tech world, and most reviewers are bought off by free units from the bigger companies. Unfortunately, most consumers are rarely particularly well educated on the subject, or on the nuances and accuracy of the devices they’re looking at, and so unfortunately rely on these type of lazy articles.
I would just like to add from my perspective that I’m super happy with my indoor monitor, I am in my mid-40s and have no issue reading the oled screen whatsoever, and the unit has performed flawlessly. It’s given me many useful insights into the air quality in my home, and acts as a trustworthy sentinel if any air quality issues suddenly arise. I think your company is doing amazing work and I for one am very grateful for that.
All the best
Paul
I thought Wired was a technology-focused magazine, but looking at wikipedia, I see:
Wired is a bi-monthly American magazine that focuses on
how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics.
And this explains it. Seems they just want to translate tech to lay persons.
The target group are not people interested in technical details and specifications. No one reading the review is interested in the complexities of defining and measuring PM2.5. Or compensation algorithms. Or the fact that TVOC is just an index, not an actual measurement. Or estimated vs NDIR vs photo-acoustic CO2 sensors. Or, or, or…
The target group are people who just want a device showing them some numbers and some LEDs. They don’t care about accuracy, they just want to feel good about doing something about air quality.
The review compares $30-something devices with $300-something devices. Sure, they’re all sensors, but there are significant differences between them. No words about what types of sensors are in these devices, cloud vs no cloud functionality, repairability etc. Again, because the people reading don’t care about these details.
Sure, at the end, they had to pick something negative, because no review is credible without it. And she picked the display. Because that’s what’s important in an air quality monitor…
In my opinion, your devices will never win when compared against sub $40 GoveeLife monitors. But that’s ok! I would bet very few of your customers would buy your monitors based on Wired reviews.
And I know you mentioned methodology. It’s described right at the end in the How I tested section. But don’t expect any lab measuring equipment or rigorous procedures. Again, because none of their readers care about this.
As a for-profit company I understand you want to expand your market, but my feeling is that, sadly, the values you cherish are not going to have too much of an impact on the majority of the buyers.
We have now 190 responses to the survey. Here are some more comments:
Reddit and Hacker News are better cases because the sites have reputation systems and provide mechanisms to call people out and see their previous contributions - this lets you figure out if someone says they’re an expert in everything or really are an expert in what they speak about.
I have owned my airgradient monitor for 2 years, and it has worked flawlessly. The ability to reconfigure it by uploading new software is unmatched by any other product on the market, as far as I am aware.
As an installer of Audio, Video, and Lighting for large venues, I always test products before recommending to clients. It’s hard to stand by your work if the stuff you install is crap. But, realize magazines like Wired are “Pay to Play”. Understand that those recommended products probably paid Wired Magazine to feature them on a “Best of” article. It’s common practice in the US. Yes, this type of marketing does work. Most purchasing managers are clueless and are easily swayed by industry magazines.
The real-deal products (such as your air monitor) will stand above the rest with its foundation of science and solid, long-term, testing. Stay the course.
Sources of reviews are becoming more unreliable
3rd party non biased testing is very important. Also I am very aware that magazines and content sites online are paid to have products featured under the guise of it being a non biased recommendation. I take these things with a grain of salt. I might read them, but look for more objective data to back it up, from people who have no vested interest in your purchase.
Keep supporting open source! That’s what brought me here. The best feature of your product is that you can’t lock me out and hold my device ransom!!!
I’ve had an AirGradient ONE for a couple of years now, and am still quite happy with it and the company. I, too, share the frustration and disappointment at the lack of quality and integrity of the WIRED review; yet another another example of enshittification.
Don’t be discouraged by one bad review
It’s absurd that their “best display” device has NO DISPLAY and is just a color! Also, AirGradient is one of (maybe) 2 air monitors that plays nicely with other home automation systems and doesn’t need me to download or register an app. My airgradient (and its display) have been plugging along every day 24x7 without issue.
I read the Wired review. When I do product research, that type of short, one paragraph subjective review is the type of review that I ignore. It’s no better than one of the hundreds of user opinion reviews you could read on Amazon. Almost worthless. I do agree with the reviewer’s comments about the display being too small, I considered that downside when I purchased the Airgradient but it wasn’t a deal breaker.
This situation has seriously damaged Wireds credibility in my opinion. I already felt their reviews were often a bit fluffy but this is beyond the pale. Now they sit slightly above Amazon ‘customer’ reviews!
There are very few publications left that I trust for a somewhat objective review. Many of the more granular testing and opinion pieces have migrated to places like reddit, hacker news, substack, etc.
Wired was once a wonderful tech magazine in the '80s and '90s, And the early 2000s. Nowadays it is just a skin suit owned by a media conglomerate, conde Nast.
Like many brands once trusted, it is a shell of its former self living off the name that it gained early in its life.
That’s crazy to me, lol. Good it happened though, because now I know WIRED is something not to be taken seriously.
The AirGradient ONE received a “Not Recommended” because WIRED is not running a review service, they are running a racket. Like most every other “review” site out there nowadays, it is a pay-to-win scheme of affiliate marketing and industry “in-crowd” quid pro quo.
I hope you can add a banner with a link to this rebuttal on the product page, so that anyone who reaches it through the wired article will see it.
Just an FYI - I used to work in online media based journalism as a Director in Operations and I will tell you right now that a vast majority of companies throw the Code of Ethics from the Society of Professional Journalism right out the window. Nearly every single one of them sees a kick back when they link a product to sites like Amazon, which is a straight up conflict of interest, regardless of what they claim. Wired is no different, I can’t link the article but you can see it at the top of each article as a disclosure. Throughout my years, I’ve gotten into disputes about policies like this and ultimately, people need to be paid and advertising and affiliate links help make that happen. Journalism is not well funded in most scenarios. It’s an unfortunate reality to the circumstances and as a result, I NEVER trust a review from anything short of consumer forums/sites like Reddit or consumer supported sites that see no sponsorship from the companies that they review, such as Consumer Reports. My spouse came across the Wired article and when they mentioned it, even they stated it was likely a biased review. I ended up searching around and found this post, which I’m glad to have seen.
When a competitor has a 1.6% referral commission and another item only links directly without any kickback, it does become hard to not side a little with the one that provides one. And using that value again (using a rate that was the lowest we saw with electronics referrals through Amazon), that’s ~$5 per outbound purchase on the ~300$ items that’s generated through a mostly evergreen article. People reading that review have a higher tendency to use it to influence their decisions in purchasing and even assuming only a 1% conversion rate and looking at average ‘review’ page annual views on their platform, that’s potentially thousands or tens of thousands in additional revenue for Wired over time. At my company, we even gave bonuses to people based on their views and affiliate revenue they earned for the company. At the end of the day, their content brought in more revenue for the company. If an article like this was made monthly, I wouldn’t be surprised to see six or more figures in generated revenue on an annual basis. It won’t last forever, but if a new article is released annually, that’s a nice boost to revenue that wouldn’t otherwise be seen.
Moral of the story? Find a source that actually scientifically tests a product and does their due diligence as well as cites their policies in an actually ethically proper way. Trust those, and take everything else with more than a grain of salt.
I noticed that the articles do not allow comments, preventing readers from providing feedback on the reviews.
In my line of work I even prefer the absence of a display, since I want the users to see more than just plain numbers. Am I alone in this?
Sorry to hear about this,
my recommendation is not to waste your time & energy on this,
WIRED is not perceived as a serious media by your current target audience (early adopters or people who look at details and/or understand basic science, or people who want the best). Wired is just one of those legacy media which is consumed by very casual crowd, and, as a lot of legacy media, they post paid/sponsored content, so I would not be surprised if the article you refer to is sponsored.
I would just keep doing what you are doing, product itself is your best marketing and as long as you keep improving & perfecting your product, everything else will fall into place.
P.S. i love your product!