A quick search for almost any vendor category returns a wave of "Top 10" and "Best in Class" lists. They look like independent research. Most of them are not.
How these lists actually get built
A meaningful share of vendor ranking content is funded, directly or indirectly, by the vendors being ranked, through sponsored placement, affiliate arrangements, or a paid submission process the reader never sees. Even lists that aren't directly paid for are often built from whichever vendors responded to an outreach email, which filters for marketing responsiveness, not delivery quality.
The review sites underneath them have the same problem
Review platforms are better than nothing, but they carry their own bias: vendors actively manage their review profile, request reviews from happy customers at a much higher rate than customers volunteer complaints, and some categories are thin enough that a handful of reviews determine a rating that reads as statistically meaningful when it isn't.
What independent actually requires
A genuinely independent evaluation has no commercial relationship with any vendor under consideration, on either side. It draws on direct reference conversations rather than aggregated review scores, and it is built around your specific requirements rather than a generic ranking meant to serve every reader who lands on the page.
That is a meaningfully higher bar than most "best of" content is built to meet, because most of that content exists to generate vendor leads, not to serve the reader evaluating them. Worth remembering the next time a ranked list is the starting point for a real decision.