Affiliate disclosure

Some links below are affiliate links, marked as such. If you buy through one I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It does not affect the rating: I have left tools I was offered money to include off this list entirely.

That is the sentence that appears on the tools page itself, above the list, where you cannot miss it. The rest of this page is the same position with the working shown.

An affiliate link carries a code that tells the tool I sent you. If you then buy, the company pays me a share: usually a one-off, sometimes a percentage of the first year. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid going there directly. There is no version of this where a link costs you more.

The programmes I am currently signed up to are: [PLACEHOLDER: the affiliate programmes currently joined, listed by name: a reader should be able to check this against the links on the tools page].

Some programmes require specific wording to be displayed verbatim. Where that applies: [PLACEHOLDER: any wording a specific affiliate programme requires you to display word-for-word: Amazon Associates, for example, mandates its own sentence].

The newsletter: [PLACEHOLDER: whether the newsletter carries affiliate links, and how they are labelled inside an email; the disclosure has to be in the email itself, not only on the site].

Every affiliate link is labelled as one where you can see it before you click, not in a footer you would have to go looking for. Both the FTC guidance and the UK rules turn on the disclosure being up front and unavoidable, and a line at the bottom of the page is neither.

Affiliate links also carry rel="sponsored" in the markup, which is the attribute search engines use to identify a paid link. It has no effect on you as a reader; it is there because passing a commercial link off as an ordinary editorial one is exactly the thing the attribute exists to stop.

If a link is not marked, it is not an affiliate link and I earn nothing from it.

It does not move a rating. The score and the verdict are written from using the tool on real work, before the question of whether a programme exists comes up at all.

It does not buy a place on the list. Tools I was offered money to include are not on it. That is not a hypothetical; it is the reason the list is short.

It does not stop me saying a tool is not worth it. Several things on that list have a commission attached and a caveat in the verdict. A directory where everything scores well is an advert, and everyone can tell.

It does not decide what I recommend to a client. If I suggest a tool during a paid engagement and I earn on it, I say so on the call, at the time. Recommending something to somebody who is paying me for advice is a different relationship from putting a link on a public page, and it gets the stricter rule.

I pay for it and use it on real work, for long enough to know where it breaks. Then it gets a verdict and a specific situation it is the right pick for. If I cannot name that situation, it does not go on.

Nothing is on the list because a company asked, and nothing is there because it was sent free. If I ever review something that was given to me, the page will say so in the review itself.

When a tool gets worse, its entry changes or it comes off. A review page that never changes is a snapshot of one afternoon, presented as a standing recommendation.

In the United States, the FTC's Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) require a material connection between an endorser and a seller (including commission) to be disclosed clearly and conspicuously, close to the claim it affects.

In the United Kingdom, the CAP Code requires marketing communications to be obviously identifiable as such, and the ASA has repeatedly ruled that affiliate content has to be labelled up front rather than in a footer.

In the EU, the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive treats undisclosed paid promotion as a misleading practice in itself.

All three point the same way, so there is no need to work out which one applies to you: the disclosure is at the top, next to the links, in the newsletter, and on this page.

If you want to know whether a specific link earns me anything, ask and I will tell you. If you would rather not use an affiliate link at all, type the tool's name into your browser instead; the recommendation is the same either way, and that is the whole test of whether it was honest.

Write to [PLACEHOLDER: public contact email]. Put the word in the subject line if you like; it does not need to be formal, and it does not need to come from a solicitor.