Methodology & sources

Two levels of verification

Every record carries a badge showing how much we checked, with the date we last looked. Right now, the official sources for 12 of our 57 programs have been reviewed this pass.

• Source reviewed — we read the linked official program page on the date shown. Each commercial field observed there is labelled “Source checked”; a term the page does not publish stays unknown.
• Listed — we confirmed the program page is live on the date shown, but did not re-read the individual terms this pass. Public commercial fields are cleared rather than carried forward from memory or an older catalogue. Listed records are the priority for a source review.

What each field means

• Commission — the published rate. For percent programs we show the range; for flat bounties the dollar amount; for revenue-share programs (common in travel) we say so, because a share of the platform's commission is not comparable to a percent of the sale.
• Cookie window — how long after your link is clicked you still get credit for a purchase.
• Min. payout — the balance you must reach before the program pays you out.
• Recurring — whether the commission repeats on renewals, not just the first payment.
• Approval — how selective the program is: open, moderate, or selective.

Our unknowns policy

If a term isn't published on the official page, we render "not publicly stated" rather than estimate. A record with gaps is honest; a record with invented numbers is worse than useless. This is most common in the AI and pet categories, where many programs run through networks and publish no public rate.

What filtering does with an unknown

A filter has to decide something about every program, and most directories quietly resolve "we don't know" as "no". That would hide a program from a recurring or 30-day cookie search purely because we hadn't read its page yet — an inference we have no basis for.

So the directory sorts each program into three groups instead of two. It matches when its published terms satisfy your filter. It is ruled out when we read the official source and the term genuinely doesn't qualify — a flat-bounty program is correctly excluded from a "40%+" filter, because we know its rate isn't a percentage. And it is unresolved when the deciding term was never observed: those programs are listed beneath the results, with the specific term we're missing, rather than disappearing. You can also filter by verification level directly to see just the source-reviewed records.

How often terms change

Affiliate terms change — sometimes quietly. A rate that was accurate when reviewed can move within months. That's why every record shows a last-verified date, and why we link to the official page on every program: the merchant's page is always the authority, and you should confirm there before relying on any figure.

A date only means something if something depends on it, so we hold ourselves to a 180-day freshness window. Once any record's last-verified date passes 180 days, our own dataset checks fail and the record is due for re-verification. That check runs against the real calendar, not a date we set by hand, so the corpus cannot quietly age out. Every figure on the site is shown with the date it was read, on every surface that prints one — the directory cards, the comparison tables on our guides, the side-by-side compare, and each program's rate sheet.

No fabricated social proof

You won't find star ratings, "user review" counts, or conversion statistics on this site. We don't have that data, and inventing it is exactly the practice this directory was built to counter. What we show is sourced terms and nothing more.

Spot an error or a change?

Terms move faster than any directory can track. If you see a figure that no longer matches a program's official page, tell us via the submit / update form and we'll re-verify and update the record.