When we earn a commission from a link, we say so.

An affiliate link is an ordinary link to a third-party product or service that carries a tracking parameter so the seller can credit Elofyn when you click through and eventually buy. The parameter is usually a query string on the URL or a redirect through a tracking domain. Either way, you arrive at the seller’s real page, you pay the seller’s real price, and the seller pays us a fee out of their margin if the purchase qualifies under that programme’s rules.

We are paid by the seller, not by you. The price on the checkout page does not change because you arrived through our link. If a seller offers our readers a discount code we will name the code in the same paragraph as the link, and the discount goes to you in full.

Every affiliate link on elofyn.com is marked in two ways. First, the link itself carries the HTML attribute rel="sponsored nofollow", which is the convention search engines and accessibility tools use to identify a paid relationship. Second, the paragraph or block the link sits in carries a short visible label, in the same vocabulary as the rest of the page, that names the relationship in plain English — for example “Elofyn earns a commission if you sign up through this link” or, on a list of tools, an “affiliate” tag next to the entry.

We do not bury the disclosure at the bottom of the page or behind a footnote. The US Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) require the disclosure to be clear, conspicuous, and close to the recommendation itself; we treat that as the floor, not the ceiling. The same rule applies on small viewports: if the disclosure would scroll out of sight on mobile while the link is still visible, the layout is wrong and we fix the layout, not the disclosure.

When we have live affiliate relationships, you will find the links in three places only. In long-form essays in the journal where we have written about a tool we use ourselves, in tool entries on the AI Tool Radar where the vendor runs a referral programme, and in the occasional resources page or round-up where every link in the list is marked consistently. We do not stitch affiliate links into unrelated pages, into the navigation, into the footer, or into transactional pages.

When a piece is updated and a tool we used to recommend is no longer one we recommend, the link comes out at the same time the recommendation does, even if the affiliate programme is still paying. The recommendation is the product; the commission is a side effect.

The decision to write about a tool, the decision to put a tool on the radar, and the decision to recommend or criticise a tool are made before the question of whether a referral programme exists is asked. We use the tools we cover. If a tool we use does not have an affiliate programme, we still write about it. If a tool we do not use offers us a generous referral fee, we do not write about it.

We do not accept payment in exchange for coverage, in exchange for a positive review, in exchange for placement on a list, or in exchange for changing what we have already written. We do not run sponsored posts. If we ever do publish sponsored content — we currently have no plans to — it will be on a separate URL path, visually distinct from editorial, with a label in the headline and the byline, and indexed separately from the rest of the journal.

Free trials, evaluation accounts, and review units are accepted under the same rule any working journalist uses: we keep them long enough to form an opinion, we return or stop using them when we are done, and the existence of the free access is disclosed in the same paragraph as the review.

Affiliate revenue, when it arrives, pays for the things that make Elofyn go — hosting, domains, the API credits the radar burns, the licences for the tools we build with. The studio is small and the running costs are modest, which is part of why we can afford to keep the editorial rule above strict: a single recommendation does not need to convert at any particular rate to keep the lights on.

We do not break out per-tool revenue publicly because most programmes prohibit it under their terms, but the journal will, from time to time, publish an aggregate note — roughly what affiliate income covered, roughly what the running costs were — so readers can see the shape without breaching any individual programme’s NDA.

As of the date at the top of this page, none. Elofyn has not joined any affiliate programme, has not signed up to any referral network, and has no live tracking links on elofyn.com. When the first programme goes live we will update this section to name the programme, the network it is run through if any, and the broad category of products it covers. The intent is that you can read this page once and have a complete list of every paid relationship the site is part of.

We will not retrospectively re-mark old posts to add an affiliate link to a tool we already recommended on editorial merit; if a programme exists on the day a piece is written, the link is marked, and if the programme appears later we leave the original link clean.

The disclosure rules above are written to satisfy the strictest regime that applies to a publisher with global readers, which on this question is the United States. The same disclosure also satisfies the rules in the jurisdictions we publish from and to.

In India, the Advertising Standards Council’s Guidelines for Influencer Advertising in Digital Media (2021) and the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules 2020 require a clear disclosure label on any post that carries a material connection between publisher and advertiser. The in-paragraph wording above is the disclosure label.

In the United Kingdom, the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) Code rule 2.1 and the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 require the same clear, up-front disclosure. The Competition and Markets Authority’s “Hidden ads” guidance treats a paragraph-level label as compliant where the label is visible at the moment the recommendation is read.

In the European Economic Area, the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive 2005/29/EC and the Digital Services Act’s transparency requirements for online platforms require the disclosure to identify the commercial nature of the content. The label above does that for each recommendation it sits next to.

We will not mask an affiliate link as an editorial link by omitting the disclosure. We will not change a recommendation in response to an affiliate fee. We will not accept a payment to remove a critical paragraph or to soften one. We will not re-rank the radar by referral payout. We will not write a review of a product we have not used. We will not run a comparison table whose ordering is set by who pays the most.

If you ever see something on elofyn.com that looks like one of these, please write to us through the contact form with the subject “Disclosure” and a link to the page. We will investigate, and if you are right we will fix it on the same day and publish a short note in the journal explaining what happened.

Most affiliate programmes set a tracking cookie on the seller’s domain when you click through, so they can attribute a later purchase. That cookie is set by the seller, not by us, and it lives on the seller’s domain — not on elofyn.com. We do not set our own tracking cookie when you click an affiliate link, and we do not pass your identity to the seller; the seller knows only that the click came from one of our marked links.

The cookies we set on elofyn.com itself are listed by name in the cookies notice. That list does not change because of affiliate links; no analytics is loaded until you accept it in the consent banner, and the consent banner does not gate or wait on affiliate redirects.

When we join an affiliate programme, leave one, or change how we mark links, we update this page to reflect the new state and revise the last-updated date at the top. The change is also summarised in the journal so a reader who has read the disclosure once does not have to come back here to learn whether anything has shifted.

The version of this page in force on the day a piece was published is the version that describes the relationships behind that piece. We do not retroactively rewrite disclosures on old posts.

Disclosure questions, complaints about a missing label, or a request to confirm whether a specific link is an affiliate link go through the contact form. Mark the subject “Disclosure” and we will answer in plain language.

If a sentence here is unclear to you, write and we will improve the language.