Disclosure
What is for sale here, and what is not.
Position in a ranking is not for sale, at any price. A sponsor cannot buy a place in a comparison, a matrix, a verdict or a recommendation. Paid placement sits beside the work, labelled, and never inside the result.
Everything else about how this publication earns money is on this page, in plain language, because a disclosure nobody can find is not a disclosure.
The one term that is not negotiable
A sponsor cannot buy a position they did not earn
This is the whole arrangement in one sentence, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not mean.
What it means. No payment changes what this publication ranks, what a matrix says, what a verdict concludes, or the order anything appears in on merit. If a page says one option is worse than another, nobody paid to make that true and nobody could have paid to make it false.
What it does not mean. A company that genuinely earns the top slot on the evidence is not disqualified from also being a sponsor. Those are two different things, and treating them as the same would mean the best option in a category could never be a commercial partner, which serves nobody. Where a placement is both earned and paid, it carries the label, and the ranking stands on the evidence that put it there.
And the honest reason this rule survives commercial pressure, because "we are principled" is not a reason anything survives: a publication whose rankings can be bought is worth less than one whose rankings cannot. Buyers who care about their own reputation are specifically shopping for the guarantee that nobody can purchase the position out from under them later. The rule is a pricing decision as much as an editorial one, which is exactly why it holds.
How paid placement is marked
Quiet label, real work, one true sentence
Every paid unit carries the word Sponsored on the unit itself, in normal reading flow, as selectable text at readable size. Not in a page banner only, not hidden, not revealed on hover, not sized or coloured to defeat reading. Every paid link carries rel="sponsored", which tells search engines the link is commercial and passes no ranking benefit.
The label is deliberately quiet rather than loud, and here is the reasoning stated openly so you can judge it rather than take it on trust. Readers skip sponsored blocks because the content in them is usually thin and written by the advertiser, not because a label exists. The label mostly tells a reader where to aim a skip they had already decided to make. A shouted badge on a unit that was genuinely tested therefore communicates something false about how reliable it is.
So the standard here is a label at the weight of a date or a category tag: visible to anyone who looks at the unit, not shouting at anyone who is skimming. If you ever find a paid placement on this site that you could not identify by looking at it, that is a defect and we want to hear about it.
Sponsored placements are tested to the same standard as everything else on the page.
That sentence is the point. It is checkable, and it is a claim a publication that sells unearned placement cannot make.
What is actually sellable
The inventory, stated plainly
For sale: sponsorship of a page or a research line; a labelled featured unit beside a comparison; contextual placement inside an article where the product is genuinely relevant to the sentence it sits in; embedded versions of the tools on other sites; and paid research or data work.
Not for sale, ever: a position in any ranking, matrix or comparison. A change to a published verdict. The removal of an unflattering finding. A cell in an open dataset. And the quiet withdrawal of a correction.
Corrections are dated and published, with the original text left visible. A correction is never removed because somebody paid, asked, or complained.
Connections you should know about
Software links, and where they point
Some pages link to studio software published by people connected to this publication. Those links are marked rel="nofollow" and pass no ranking benefit, and they appear only where the software has no position on any question the page answers. A compressor has no opinion on what a beat licence grants, which is the test applied before any of them is placed.
They are never ranked, rated, scored or compared here, and they never appear inside a comparison of anything. If that ever changes, this paragraph changes with it.
Current state, as of 2026-08-14: there is no active sponsorship on this site, no affiliate link anywhere on it, and no paid placement live. This page describes the terms under which that would happen, so that the terms are published before the first deal rather than after it.
If something here is wrong
If a figure on this site is wrong, if a paid placement is not identifiable, or if a licence term we quoted has changed, tell us and we will date the correction and leave the original visible. That is the whole policy and there is no version of it that involves quietly editing something away.
Read alongside the methodology, which covers sourcing, limits and how studies are run.