How to read an affiliate review, including this one

Six things worth checking before you trust any review site, mine included.

This site earns money when you buy through its links. That is disclosed on every page, but a disclosure only tells you the incentive exists. It does not tell you whether the review survived it. Here is what I would check, and I would rather you applied it to me than took my word for anything.

1. Does the review say who should not buy it

This is the fastest test. A review written to convert will bury the drawbacks or phrase them as strengths in disguise. A review written to be useful will name a group of people and tell them to go elsewhere. If nobody is told to walk away, the piece is an advertisement with a rating on it.

2. Is there evidence the writer used the product

Screenshots taken from the vendor's own homepage prove nothing. What proves something is a screen capture with the writer's own account name and a date on it, a support ticket with a response time, a number that could only come from running the thing. Look for that. Most sites do not have it.

3. Is the scoring method published, and does the score follow it

A number out of ten with no rubric behind it is decoration. If a site publishes weights, read them, then check whether the score in a specific review actually follows from what the review says. If a product is described as expensive and shallow and still scores 9.2, you have learned something about the site.

4. Where is the disclosure

The rule in the United States is that a disclosure has to be, in the regulator's own words, unavoidable. A link at the bottom of the page marked "Disclosure" is avoidable by design, and the Federal Trade Commission has said as much directly. If you had to go looking for it, that tells you how the site thinks about you.

5. Does the ranking match the commission

This one takes two minutes and is worth it. Open the top-ranked product's affiliate programme and look at its rate. Do the same for the one ranked fourth. If the order of the list matches the order of the payouts across a whole category, that is not proof of anything, but it is a pattern worth noticing.

6. Is the update date real

Plenty of sites refresh the date on a page without changing a word, because freshness helps rankings. You can usually catch it: if the page says it was updated last month but quotes a price that changed six months ago, nothing was checked. Google treats manipulated dates as a spam signal, and so should you.

What I do about my own conflict

Three things, and none of them make the conflict disappear. The weights I score against are published and fixed before I test. I say on the page when I have not finished testing something, rather than filling the gap with confident prose. And I will not remove a criticism because a vendor asks, though I will correct a fact and say that I did.

The honest admission is that I am more likely to review a product that has an affiliate programme than one that does not, because that is how this site pays for itself. That is a real bias and I cannot argue it away. What I can do is tell you it is there, so you can weigh it.