Affiliate Disclosure
This page is our disclosure of a material connection, written in plain language and in line with the Federal Trade Commission's Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 255). The short version: LegitScout is reader-supported, and if you buy something after clicking a link on this site, we may earn a commission from the brand you bought from, at no extra cost to you. The rest of this page explains exactly how that works, which links are involved, and — just as important — what it doesn't change about how we review brands.
How We're Compensated
LegitScout is a participant in affiliate marketing programs run through Impact (impact.com) and Awin, two widely used affiliate networks, and we may join additional networks or individual brand programs over time as we add more brands to the site. Where a brand relationship is active within one of these networks, clicking through from our site and completing a qualifying purchase can result in that brand paying a commission to the network, which then pays a share of it to us. You never pay more by buying through a link on this site than you would by going to the brand directly — the commission comes out of the brand's marketing budget, not your pocket.
Which Links Are Affiliate Links
Any button or text link on this site that takes you to a brand's website — a "Visit
[Brand]" button, a pricing link inside a review, a link on a deals page — may be an
affiliate link. Where a brand relationship is active, our code marks that link with a
rel="sponsored" attribute (alongside nofollow) in the page's
HTML, the label search engines ask publishers to use on paid and affiliate placements.
That markup is applied automatically and consistently across the whole site, not decided
link by link. Until a given brand's affiliate relationship is approved by its network, our
link to that brand goes straight to the brand's own official website, exactly like typing
the address yourself, and we earn nothing from it.
As an Example
Say you read a review of a VPN on this site and click the "Visit [Brand]" button. If that brand's affiliate relationship is active, the click routes through a tracking link operated by Impact or Awin before landing you on the brand's own sign-up page — you still end up in the same place, just by a route that credits LegitScout for sending you there. If you then subscribe within that network's tracking window, the brand pays a commission to the network, and the network pays a share of it to LegitScout. If the relationship isn't active yet, that same button just takes you directly to the brand's site, with no tracking link and no commission for us either way.
What This Doesn't Change
Commissions never influence a rating, a pro, a con, or a single sentence of a review. We decide scores using the same published process for every brand — laid out in full on our How We Review page — regardless of whether that brand pays us a commission, pays us nothing, or would rather we didn't cover it at all. Brands don't preview or approve reviews before they publish, and no one can pay for a better score or for criticism to be softened or removed.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you want to know whether a specific link on a specific page is currently an affiliate link, email us at contact@legitscout.com.