Some links on this site are commercial. If you sign up through one, we may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. That is how the research is funded.
#Why we tell you this so prominently
Disclosure of a material connection is required by the United States Federal Trade Commission under 16 CFR Part 255, and by comparable consumer-protection rules in the UK, the EU and elsewhere. But the better reason is simpler: if you cannot see where our incentive lies, you have no way to weigh what we write.
#What commission does not buy
- It does not buy a score. Scores come from the rubric published in how we test, applied identically to every provider.
- It does not buy a ranking or a place on a shortlist.
- It does not change a figure. Prices, pool sizes and performance numbers come from the sources cited on the page.
- It does not suppress a negative finding. We publish what we found.
- It does not buy advance sight. No provider reviews a draft before publication.
#How to spot a commercial link
Two signals, both automatic:
- Commercial links carry
rel="sponsored"in the page markup — the standard machine-readable signal that search engines and browser extensions read. You can confirm this yourself with your browser’s inspector. - A disclosure box appears on any page that carries a commercial link, or that ranks a provider we have a relationship with. That box is generated by the publishing system rather than added by hand, so it cannot be forgotten.
#Providers we have no relationship with
We review and rank providers regardless of whether any commercial arrangement exists. A provider that pays us nothing is assessed identically, and can and does outrank one that does.
#Trials and review access
We sometimes receive trial access in order to test a service. This is disclosed on the page. Accepting trial access does not change a score, and we do not accept access conditional on coverage, on approval rights, or on a minimum rating.
#What we do not sell
- Sponsored posts.
- Paid reviews or paid rankings.
- Guest posts.
- Link placements or link insertions in existing articles.
- Newsletter placements.
If any of that ever changes, this page changes first, and anything sponsored will be labelled as sponsored on the page itself.
#Holding us to it
If you find a page where a commercial link is not disclosed, or where a ranking looks inconsistent with the published rubric, tell us at [email protected]. We will fix it and say what changed.