Affiliate disclosure

ReviewKong earns money through affiliate commissions. Some links on this site pay us when you buy; none of them buy a position in a ranking. Everything below explains how that actually works, in enough detail that you can verify most of it yourself.

How the money reaches us

When you follow a commercial link here, it passes through a redirect on our own domain — a URL beginning /click/ — which records the referral and forwards you to the company or to the affiliate network running its programme. If you then buy something, the company may pay us a percentage of the sale or a fixed fee per customer.

You pay exactly what you would have paid arriving there any other way. The fee comes out of the company’s marketing budget; there is no version of the checkout where our link makes it more expensive. Commission is also paid on a delay and clawed back on refunds, which is worth knowing because it means we have no financial reason to push you toward a purchase you will send back.

How to tell which links pay us

• Every guide carries the disclosure in plain language above the ranking, before the first commercial link appears, and it is repeated in the footer of every page on the site.
• Paying links are marked rel="sponsored" in the page source and route through /click/. That is the machine-readable signal search engines expect — a supplement to the human-readable disclosure, never a substitute for it.
• Links to brands that pay us nothing are marked rel="nofollow" and point straight at the company’s own site with no redirect and nothing recorded.
• You do not have to read the markup to find out. Where a ranked or reviewed brand is not a partner, the card says so on its face: not an affiliate partner — this link earns us nothing.

Which brands pay us nothing

Naming them is the cheapest way to make the point checkable. As of the date at the top of this page, 4 brands we recommend or rank earn us nothing at all:

• EasyOptOuts
• Insured Nomads
• Mullvad
• Turkish Airlines

Some of them run no affiliate programme in the first place; at least one declines to pay reviewers for traffic as a matter of policy, which we think is to its credit. They stay in the rankings because they earned the place. If one of them ever does start paying us, it moves off this list in the same change that adds the tracked link — the list above is generated from the same data that decides how each link is built, so it cannot quietly fall out of date.

What commission does not change

• Placement. Rankings follow the criteria printed on the guide itself. A brand cannot buy a higher position and we do not sell one. Nobody outside the editorial side sees a ranking before it is published.
• Drawbacks. Every brand we cover gets a section on what does not work about it. Partners are not exempt, and we have never removed a criticism because a partner asked.
• Inclusion. A brand that deserves the place gets it whether or not there is money behind the link — see the list above.
• The verdict. Where the right answer for a particular reader is a product that pays us less or nothing, the guide says so in those words.

What we do not accept, at any price

• Payment for a position in a ranking, a review score, or a place on a shortlist.
• Sponsored posts, advertorial, or copy written by a brand and published as editorial.
• Paid link insertions into existing articles — the most common request we get, and an automatic no.
• Removing or softening a documented drawback in exchange for a commercial relationship.
• Reviewing a brand we are otherwise financially involved with beyond the affiliate programme.

What it does change, honestly

Commercial reality deserves an honest account rather than a denial. We are more likely to write about categories where affiliate programmes exist, because that is what pays for the work: you will find a guide to VPNs here and not one to public library cards. Commission rates also differ between brands in ways we do not control and cannot always see in advance.

So: within a category, the ranking is editorial and the rates play no part in it. Across categories, the economics influence what we cover first. Pretending otherwise would be the kind of claim this page exists to avoid making.

Prices, figures and accuracy

Prices, plan structures and promotional terms in these categories change monthly, and promotional pricing is designed to be hard to compare. Every page shows the date it was last reviewed. Treat our figures as a guide and the company’s own checkout as the authority — and if you find something out of date, tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it and say that we did.

Advertising standards

This disclosure is written to meet the expectations of the advertising regulators in the markets we publish to — including the United States Federal Trade Commission’s endorsement guides, which require disclosure that is clear, conspicuous and placed before the endorsement, and the equivalent UK and EU rules on identifying commercial content. If you think a page here falls short of that standard, we would rather hear it from you than from a regulator: [email protected].