Affiliate disclosure

How it works

When a merchant runs an affiliate programme, the link we send you through carries a tag identifying us. If you buy, the merchant pays us a small percentage of the sale. The price you pay is identical to the price you would pay arriving there any other way; affiliate commission comes out of the merchant's margin, not off your bill.

Not every deal has one. Plenty of merchants run no programme, and for some offers the right link is the merchant's own official page. In those cases we link there and earn nothing, which is the intended outcome of ranking on quality rather than on revenue.

What commission cannot do

• It cannot raise a score. The deal score is computed from discount depth, price context, verification confidence, and offer conditions. Whether an affiliate link exists is not one of the inputs.
• It cannot buy placement. Latest is ordered by publication time. Featured is ordered by reader votes. Flash and Bomb are ordered by how long an offer is valid. None of those orderings can be purchased.
• It cannot get a bad deal published. An offer that fails verification is not published, regardless of what it would have paid.
• It cannot suppress a correction. If a commissionable deal turns out to be wrong, it gets corrected or marked ended like any other.

The safeguards, concretely

Stating independence is easy, so here is what enforces it. Scoring runs before any affiliate link is attached, and the scorer is not given the link. A deal marked as sponsored without a disclosed affiliate URL fails an automated content-quality rule and cannot publish. Reader votes, which drive Featured, are one per browser and per account, and we do not vote on our own deals. Every outbound commercial link is marked rel="sponsored nofollow" in the HTML, so you and search engines see the same declaration.

You can verify the last of those yourself: view the source of any deal page and read the attributes on the action button.

Sponsored content

If we ever publish something a merchant paid us to feature, it will be labelled as sponsored on the page itself, not disclosed only here. Payment does not entitle a merchant to editorial approval, a score, a claim we cannot evidence, or removal of a condition from the fine print.

Why we tell you this

A deals site funded by commission has an obvious conflict of interest, and the useful response is to name it rather than bury it. The reason our scoring pipeline never sees the affiliate link is precisely so that the conflict has no mechanism to act through. If you ever spot a deal that looks like it was scored generously because of who pays us, tell us at [email protected] — that is a bug report, and we will treat it as one.