Standard solar models (SSMs) constitute a reference framework for several areas of research, including solar and stellar structure, solar neutrino physics, and particle physics. Their underlying philosophy is to provide a well-defined and internally consistent description of the Sun, enabling quantitative predictions with a minimal number of free parameters and calibrations. SSMs, like all theoretical models, represent an idealized and incomplete description of the Sun.

By construction, the evolution of SSMs over time is primarily driven by updates to their physical inputs, such as the solar chemical composition, nuclear reaction cross sections, radiative opacities, and the equation of state. The inclusion of additional physical processes—such as rotation or magnetic fields—is conventionally classified as belonging to non-standard solar models. Although this distinction is to some extent arbitrary, processes excluded from SSMs generally require additional assumptions or tunable parameters, which tend to reduce the predictive power of non-SSMs.

Despite the shortcomings, the SSM framework has been successful in describing main results from helioseismology and solar neutrinos, and have contributed largely to our understanding of stellar structure, the discovery of neutrino oscillations, and continue to be a benchmark for stellar models.