Advertising Policy

The principle

A page exists to help you, not to carry an advert. Where those two things conflict, the page wins. That sounds like something every publisher says, so the rest of this document is the specific, checkable version of it.

Where advertising may never appear

• No ads on an active timed question screen on mobile.
• No ads between a question prompt and its answer choices.
• No ads adjacent to Submit, Next, Continue, Start or Download controls.
• No ads over or beside the timer or the question navigator.
• No pop-ups, forced interstitials, preset auto-refresh or floating overlays.
• No incentivised views of standard ads and no requests to click ads.
• No ads on premium, checkout or account-settings screens.
• Every slot reserves its dimensions to prevent layout shift.
• Every slot is labelled "Advertisement" or "Sponsored links".

The first of those matters most. No advertisement appears on an active timed question screen. Several subtests give you ten to twelve seconds per question, and a distraction at that pace does not merely annoy you — it changes your result and destroys the point of practising on the clock.

This is not a guideline we intend to follow. The ad component refuses to render in a timed-question, explanation or section-transition context, and throws an error instead. A developer who places a slot there breaks the build rather than shipping it, and a test asserts each forbidden context individually.

Where advertising may appear

Only after something useful, and always clearly separated from controls:

• On the homepage and the practice library, after a complete section of content.
• On test instructions, after the useful part rather than above it.
• At a section transition, after the summary and away from the continue control.
• Between substantive modules on a results page, never between an answer and its explanation.
• Between groups of reviewed questions.
• In long guides, after a complete content block.

Not on this page, nor on the privacy policy, the corrections log, the methodology page or the accessibility statement. Pages that exist to establish trust do not carry inventory.

Labelling and layout

Every unit is labelled “Advertisement” or “Sponsored links” in plain language, and is visually distinct from the surrounding content. Nothing will be styled to resemble a practice question, an answer choice, a score report or a download button.

Every slot reserves its dimensions before anything loads, so the page does not move when an advert arrives or fails to. You can see that working right now: the reserved boxes on this site keep their height while displaying an explanation of why they are empty, rather than collapsing and reflowing the page.

No pop-ups, no forced interstitials, no floating overlays, no auto-refresh, and no autoplaying audio or video.

What we will not accept

• Anything claiming to sell real AFOQT questions, or guaranteed scores or selection.
• Anything implying affiliation with or endorsement by the Air Force, the Department of Defense or Pearson VUE.
• Predatory lending, or financial products targeting service members with misleading terms.
• Anything that would mislead a candidate about testing requirements or eligibility.

Advertising never touches editorial

No advertiser reviews content before publication. No commercial relationship earns a mention, a ranking or a link in editorial text. We do not accept payment to include or exclude anything from a comparison.

The test of that is our comparison page, which publishes criteria and then applies them to this site, including where we fail. Affiliate arrangements are handled separately under the affiliate disclosure.

Consent and data

Advertising normally involves cookies and identifiers set by the ad provider rather than by us. Before any of that is enabled, a consent mechanism will be in place where the law requires one, the cookie policy will list every cookie with its provider, purpose and lifetime, and the privacy policy will be updated in the same change — before it ships, not afterwards.

Until a consent platform is integrated, the site requests no advertising at all. That is a deliberate failure direction: we lose revenue rather than you losing a choice you were entitled to make.

Why advertising rather than a paywall

The alternative model is obvious and we rejected it deliberately, so the reasoning should be visible.

Paywalling the practice material would produce a cleaner experience and better revenue per user. It would also mean that a candidate who cannot spare the money prepares worse for a commissioning attempt than one who can — and given who sits this exam and why, that is not a trade we wanted to make.

Advertising is the compromise. It funds the free tier, it is intrusive in ways a paywall is not, and the rules above exist to keep that intrusion within limits that do not damage the thing you came for. If those rules make the inventory less valuable — no ads during timed questions is a real revenue cost — that is the intended outcome rather than an oversight.

There is deliberately no way to pay to remove them. A paid ad-free tier would give us a commercial reason to make the free experience worse, and we would rather not hold that incentive at all.

Complaining about an advert

Programmatic advertising means we do not see every creative served, which makes reader reports the main way these rules get enforced. If you see something here that breaks them, send us the page and a description through the contact page. We treat it as a defect, not as feedback.