Affiliate disclosure
How Tested AI makes money, which links earn commission, and why revenue has no effect on scores or rankings.
Last updated
The short version
Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It never changes a score, a ranking, or whether a tool gets recommended.
What an affiliate link is
An affiliate link carries a tracking code. If you click it and later subscribe, the vendor pays us a percentage of that subscription. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid going direct. In most cases the commission is a one-off payment on the first invoice.
Affiliate links on this site are marked with the sponsored link attribute, which is the standard way of telling search engines a link is commercial.
Why this does not bend the reviews
There are four structural reasons, not just a promise:
- We take nothing from vendors. No free accounts, no press licences, no sponsored placements. A vendor cannot get access to us by giving us something.
- The figures are public and checkable. Every price we publish comes from the vendor's own page. If we shaded a number to favour a paying program, you could catch it in thirty seconds by opening that page yourself.
- We publish uncertainty against our own interest. Telling you to go confirm a price directly, as we do for Canva and Close CRM, sends you away from our affiliate link. We do it anyway, because the alternative is quoting a number we cannot stand behind. The full process is on the methodology page.
- We rank tools with no affiliate program. Several current top picks pay us nothing at all, and they still rank first, because that is where the testing put them.
Display advertising
The ad slots on this site are filled programmatically by a third-party network. We do not sell placements directly, advertisers cannot buy their way into an article, and no advertiser sees editorial before it is published. Ads are labelled as advertising wherever they appear.
What we will never do
- Accept payment for a review, a score, a badge, or a place on a list
- Publish sponsored content dressed up as editorial
- Send a draft to a vendor for approval before publication
- Remove or soften a criticism because a vendor asked
- Add a tool to a best-of list because it has the highest commission rate
FTC compliance
US Federal Trade Commission guidelines require clear and conspicuous disclosure of material connections between a publisher and the products it endorses. That is why the disclosure appears at the top of every article containing affiliate links, in the site footer, and on this page, rather than buried in small print.
Questions
If you think a recommendation on this site looks commercially motivated, say so. Write to hello@testedai.blog and we will explain exactly how the score was reached, criterion by criterion.