Who decides what gets published here
This site takes money from sponsors and from affiliate links, and it also tells readers which tools to skip. Those two things only coexist if the rules are written down and hold when a deal is on the table. This page is those rules: what a sponsor buys, what nobody can buy, how a page gets commissioned and retired, and what happens when we get something wrong.
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Sales and editorial are separated, and here is exactly where the line is
Most publishers in this category say their advertising is separate from their editorial and then leave the reader to guess what that means in practice. The useful version of that promise is a list of what changes hands, so this is ours.
Every commercial arrangement we accept fits in one sentence: a sponsor buys a labelled slot and our attention, and never a word in a guide they are not named in. When those two things pull against each other, the guide wins, because a comparison nobody trusts is worth nothing to sell against next quarter.
- What a sponsor buys
- A clearly labelled placement, a link that carries rel="sponsored", and our time writing it well. Nothing else is for sale.
- What a sponsor cannot buy
- A position in a comparison guide, the removal of a criticism, a rating, or a link from an existing editorial page into their own.
- Who signs off
- The same editorial standard signs off both. A sponsored page that would embarrass us as an editorial page does not run, and we have turned work down on that basis.
- How you can tell
- Sponsored pages carry a label above the fold, not a line in the footer. Affiliate links carry rel="sponsored" whether or not the page mentions them.
How a page gets commissioned, checked, and retired
A page here is not finished when it is published. Pricing in the SEO-tool market moves several times a year, plan limits get quietly cut, and a guide written against last year's free tier misleads a reader who trusts it. So the interesting part of an editorial policy is not the writing standard, it is what happens in month nine.
Our answer is a fixed re-read cycle on the pages most likely to rot, and a refusal to re-date anything we have not actually re-checked. If the date on a page moved, something on that page moved with it.
- Commissioned
- A page runs when there is a question a reader is actually asking and we have a defensible source for the answer. Search volume alone is not a reason.
- Sourced
- Every figure gets a source and the month it was checked. Where the source is a vendor's own documentation, we say so rather than implying a test.
- Reviewed
- Tool pages are re-read on a 90-day cycle because pricing in this category moves. The dateModified on the page is the real date it was last touched.
- Retired
- A page that can no longer be kept accurate is rewritten or removed, not left up with a fresh date on stale numbers.
Corrections, in public and dated
Getting something wrong is not the failure; leaving it wrong is. A correction is made on the page that carried the error, the modified date changes, and a material correction, meaning one that changes the advice rather than the spelling, carries a short note saying what changed.
Readers and vendors both use the same route for this: the contact form, pointing at the claim and the source. We check the vendor's live documentation before changing a figure, because a support-desk email is not a published price.
What we will not do is quietly edit a claim out of a page and leave the impression it never ran. The whole reason to publish a standard is that it costs something when you follow it.