Affiliate disclosure

What an affiliate link is

A link that pays the site a commission if you buy something after clicking it, at no extra cost to you. It is a normal way for a publication like this to survive. It is also an obvious way for a publication like this to become useless, if the commission starts deciding what gets recommended.

The rules we are binding ourselves to

• Any page containing affiliate links carries a disclosure box above the content it applies to, not buried in the footer.
• Affiliate links are marked rel="sponsored nofollow" in the HTML.
• Commission rates never affect rankings, recommendations or the order of a comparison. If the best option for you pays us nothing, that is still the recommendation, and we will say outright that it pays us nothing.
• We will not accept payment for a review, a placement, a link, or a rewrite. No sponsored posts, no “partnerships” that produce coverage.
• We will not join a programme whose terms require us to hide the relationship or avoid criticising the product.
• Free products stay in comparisons on merit. Open-source tools that pay nobody anything will keep being recommended when they are the right answer.

Why this page exists now

Writing the rules while there is no money at stake is easy. That is exactly why it is worth doing now rather than later. You can hold us to it. The page history is public, so if these rules ever get quietly loosened, that is something you can check.