Affiliate Disclosure

Why publish this now

Because a disclosure policy written after the first commission arrives tends to be written to accommodate it. Setting the constraints while there is no money at stake is the only moment at which they cost nothing — and therefore the only moment at which you have much reason to believe them.

It also means you can check us later. If a future version of this site carries affiliate links that break the rules below, that is a documented broken promise rather than a change of policy nobody noticed.

The rules, if that changes

• Labelled at the link, not in the footer. Any affiliate link will be marked where it appears, so you know before you click rather than after. Links will carry the appropriate rel attribute.
• A disclosure at the top of any page containing one, above the content it might influence, not buried at the bottom.
• Commission never affects a recommendation. If we would not recommend something without the commission, we do not recommend it with the commission. The test of this is whether an unpaid option can win a comparison — it must be able to.
• No affiliate links inside practice material. Question explanations and score reports stay clean. If you are mid-drill, you are not being sold to.
• Nothing that undermines our own advice. We will not take commission from anyone claiming to sell real test questions or guaranteed scores, nor from a product we have criticised.
• Comparisons keep their methodology. Criteria, capture dates and limitations are published whether or not any listed product pays us, and the disclosure sits alongside the comparison rather than somewhere else.

Why affiliate income is harder to keep honest than advertising

The two are usually mentioned together and they create quite different pressures, which is worth being explicit about.

Display advertising is sold programmatically. We do not choose the advertisers, they do not know what we wrote, and the revenue does not vary with our editorial opinion of anything. The integrity risk is about placement — whether an advert is somewhere it should not be — and that is a problem you can solve in code, which is what our ad component does.

Affiliate income is different in kind. It pays more when we recommend a specific product, which means the incentive points directly at the content. No component can enforce that, and a policy alone is only as good as the person applying it under commercial pressure.

That asymmetry is why the rules above are stricter than the advertising ones, and why the honest position today is simply that we have no such relationships. If that changes, the thing to watch is not whether we disclose — disclosure is easy — but whether an unpaid option ever wins a comparison.

How this interacts with advertising

Advertising and affiliate income are different things and are governed separately. Advertising is display inventory sold programmatically, with no influence on content and no advertiser reviewing anything — see the advertising policy. An affiliate link is editorial: it appears inside content we wrote, which is exactly why it needs the stricter treatment above.

Neither may influence what we publish. Our editorial policy states that no commercial relationship earns a mention, a ranking position or a link in editorial text, and the practical test of it is our comparison page, which lists this site’s own shortcomings alongside everyone else’s.

What we sell

Nothing. There is no paid tier, no account system and no checkout anywhere on this site, and no payment processing is connected. Every practice test, explanation and report is free to everyone.

This page exists anyway, because the honest disclosure is about incentives rather than transactions: once advertising is running we will be paid for attention, and you are entitled to know that before you weigh anything we say about another provider.

What we would recommend that pays us nothing

A useful signal about any site’s independence is whether it ever points you somewhere it earns nothing from. Ours does, repeatedly and by design.

We tell candidates to get their minimum scores, retake rules and registration details from their recruiter rather than from us. We point at official sources for the exam structure and link to them rather than reproducing the content here. Our comparison page hands you criteria for judging providers instead of a ranking with us at the top, and it names cases where a paid book beats what we offer.

None of that is charity — it is what the material honestly supports. But it is also the test worth applying to anyone in this niche, including us: does the site ever cost itself something by being accurate?

If you spot a problem

If you find a link on this site that looks commercial and is not disclosed, please tell us. Given that we currently have no affiliate relationships at all, such a link would be an error on our part, and we would want to fix it and log it on the corrections page.