How your advice is made
You’re trusting a stranger’s opinion about spending a lot of money — and we’re not even charging you for it. Here is precisely what that opinion is built from, and who actually pays for it.
1 · Sources
What you answer
7 steps, then one email click
The bikes we choose from
2'737 bikes · 56 makers · geometry on 1'023
The bike you own nowoptional
Our brand file
56 makers · 8 flagged
The house voice
written, not generated
How we read each source
Every maker and shop publishes its range in its own shape, and the price it states is not always the price of a bike — a frame sold beside the builds is the usual trap. This is what each kind of source gives us and where its price comes from, kept beside the code that does the reading, so the list cannot drift from what runs.
Shopify shopsThömus · Surly · Evil · Kona · 3T · BMC · Cinelli · Salsa · +8
The shop's own product JSON: title, type, tags, and one variant per size or colour with its price and stock. On a shop with country markets, the country's product page is read for that market's price.
price The cheapest variant that is a complete bike. A frame sold as a variant is set aside and kept as the frame's own price; a product with only frame variants is a frameset.
WooCommerce shopsPropain · Bianchi
The shop's Store API: products by category with price, stock, images and attributes.
price The product's price, which the shop sets at its cheapest variation. Where a variation is a frame, the builds are priced one by one and the frame is set aside.
Canyon
Every product page from the sitemap, each carrying a schema.org ProductGroup: the build, its model year and discipline, and one offer per colour and size with price, stock and condition.
price The cheapest new-condition offer of the build. Outlet bikes are marked used.
Trek
Each bike page embeds the product records of a whole family, and Trek states itself which products are bicycles.
price The low end of the build's stated price range.
Specialized
Five category pages of the Swiss shop, then each product page's embedded record: name, model year, family, every colour with its sizes, stock and prices, and the geometry table. Read slowly, a page at a time.
price The cheapest size of the cheapest colour, as the shop sells it.
Cube
The category tree of one country's site, then each product page's analytics record and geometry table. Cube sells through dealers, so the price is a recommended retail price.
price The one price the page states.
Rose
A per-country sitemap of family pages, each linking its builds; each build page carries a schema.org Product with an offer in that country's currency.
price The one price the build's page states.
FLYER
A product sitemap per market; the page's own configuration says which currency and whether the market sells direct.
price The one price the page states, in the currency the market's own configuration names.
Yeti
One page per family with a card per kit and its price.
price Each kit's own price. The frame-only card is a frameset, not a bike.
Transition
One page per family with a build selector; every complete build with its price.
price Each build's own price. Frame kits are framesets.
Catalogue makersCommencal · Liv · Factor · Giant · Pinarello · Colnago · Ibis · Cannondale · +4
Makers who publish their range but no price: the model pages from the sitemap or the listing pages, the name each page gives itself, the type from its address.
price None. These bikes are kept for what they are; a price attaches later from a shop that sells them.
Browser importsMondraker · YT Industries · Radon · Merida
Makers whose pages are empty until a browser runs them. A script drives a real browser over the range once and files what it read; the same naming and frameset rules then apply.
price The price the page showed when it was read, with the date it was read.
2 · The shortlist
Before anything is asked of an AI, plain rules pick at most 100 bikes for you. Out go the wrong type, the wrong motor choice, anything more than 1 model year old, makers who don’t sell where you live, and anything priced more than 30% outside your budget band. What’s left is scored:
Then no maker may take more than 3 places and no frame family more than 3, the same frame in different groupsets counts once, and a bike with no price on file stays in — ranked below one with a price, never thrown out. These numbers are read from the same setting the engine uses, so this page can’t say one thing while it does another.
Only from the list
The answer format itself only accepts bikes from the shortlist, by id. A bike it remembers that isn't on the list does not exist for this answer.
Facts we hold, not facts it recalls
For the leading bikes we read the maker's own page — the one our catalogue already verified — and hand over what it states. What we learn is kept for the next rider.
Honest about the price
Every price line says how sure we are: sold in your region · seen on another region's storefront and converted loosely · or no price on file. It repeats that certainty to you rather than smoothing it over.
Say what it gets you
Never leave a spec to speak for itself — not “a relaxed front end” but what that does on a steep descent.
Prove the fit
Size from the inseam; where we hold the geometry, compare it against the bike you own. Where we don't, it says so instead of quoting numbers.
Flag the company
A brand in trouble gets said out loud before it gets recommended.
3 · The call
What comes back
And a photo of eachfrom the maker
What we won’t claim
There is no public data on bicycle reliability. Not thin — none. The big rider surveys contain no reliability questions, the fatigue labs keep results confidential, and no manufacturer publishes warranty claim rates. Anyone ranking bike brands by reliability is guessing.
So we don’t. We tell you what’s documented — a recall on that exact model, published service intervals, who covers bearings, where the frame is really made — and when something is an opinion, it reads like one.
Who is paying
Not you — and not the bike industry’s marketing money either. Choosebike is free. When you buy through some of the shop links in your advice, that retailer pays us a small commission; the price is the same for you either way. That commission is the entire business model.
And here’s the part we didn’t expect: the affiliate world is also where the clean data lives. Retailers publish machine-readable feeds of exactly what’s in stock at exactly what price — the facts an AI is worst at recalling — and those feeds come with commission links attached. Wiring them in makes the advice more precise and funds it in the same motion. The picks are always locked before any link is attached, so a commission can never choose your bike.
It has never ridden the bike. It compares geometry, price, spec and the record of the company behind it — feel is not in any of that, and a shop that lets you ride two bikes back to back is still worth your afternoon. Prices and stock move; treat the answer as the state of our catalogue on the day you asked. Missing a maker you’d want considered? Ask for it.