Editorial and Affiliate Policy
How we assess supplement products, and what money can and cannot change about it.
Why this exists now
We have no affiliate partners. Nobody pays us anything, and at our current traffic nobody would want to.
That is exactly why this is written now. A policy written after the first commission cheque has to be defended. A policy written before it is just what we do. Every rule below is written to survive the situation where following it costs us money.
Assessments are never conditional on a commercial relationship
We assess a product because readers ask about it, or because it is large enough in the category to matter. Never because a brand asked, paid, or offered to pay.
We do not accept payment for a review, for a place in a comparison, or to be assessed sooner. There is no rate card because there is nothing to sell here.
A brand that asks what it would cost to be reviewed gets told it does not work like that, and gets assessed on the same terms as everyone else or not at all.
A partnership cannot move a score, a rank, or a conclusion
Our rubric is published. The inputs are the label, the price, the published research, and arithmetic on those three. A commercial relationship is not one of the inputs and it never becomes one.
All of these are prohibited: adjusting a check because a brand is a partner, reordering a comparison so a partner ranks higher, adding or reweighting a check to change an outcome, softening a fact, dropping an unflattering figure, delaying a finding while a commercial conversation is in progress, or giving a partner advance sight of a draft that non-partners would not get.
If a partner scores badly, we publish that they scored badly. If that ends the partnership, the partnership ends.
Factual corrections are the exception, and they are open to everyone. Anyone can tell us a figure is wrong. We check it against the source, and if we got it wrong we fix it and date the change. That changes what a page says without changing who gets to say it.
Disclosure sits on the page, not in a footer
Where a page contains an affiliate link, the disclosure appears in the body of that page, near the link, before you would click it. Not in the site footer. Not on a legal page you have to go looking for.
Every product assessment carries a disclosure line whether or not money is involved, including when it says we have no commercial relationship with anyone named. A disclosure that only shows up when there is something to disclose is itself a signal, and it teaches you to assume the worst about the pages that carry one.
The wording is plain: we earn a commission if you buy through this link, it does not change what the page says, and our rubric does not know which brands pay us.
Commercial data does not reach the ranking code
This is the engineering half of rule 2, and it is the half you can verify. Whatever ranks, scores or recommends a product does not read partner status, commission rate, or click performance. Recommendation logic and commercial logic stay separate, and they are joined only at the point of display.
A policy nobody can check is a press release, so this one is enforced by a test rather than by good intentions.
Free product is declared, and never requested in exchange for coverage
If a brand sends product unsolicited we may use it, and we say so on the page. We do not ask for product, and we never accept it on the understanding that coverage follows. The same goes for events, trips and gifts.
No affiliate links inside a health question
Ask the Almanac entries that answer a question about someone's routine carry no affiliate links. Somebody asking whether they are double-dosing zinc is not a shopping intent, and monetising that moment is what a supplement affiliate site does. We are not one.
Affiliate links belong on category and comparison pages, where a reader has already decided to buy something and is choosing between options.
We publish what we would rather not
If our audit tool, a guide, or an earlier assessment turns out to be wrong, we correct it in place and date the change. Including when it makes us look bad. Including when the wrong figure happened to benefit a partner.
What we are not allowed to tell you
We are UK-based, so the CAP Code governs what we publish about nutrients, not only what brands publish. We may only use health claims that appear on the GB nutrition and health claims register. We may not say a food prevents, treats or cures anything. And we may not suggest that a widespread deficiency exists, which rules out the most persuasive sentence available to any supplement company.
That last one constrains us more than it constrains them, and we think that is correct. When we cite an amount, it comes from a current label or from government guidance, and we link to the source so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Telling us we got something wrong
Email hello@stackalmanac.com. If a figure on any page is wrong, or a label has changed since we checked it, we will correct the page and date the change. This applies to brands we have assessed as much as to readers.
The method behind our product assessments is published too. See how to evaluate an all-in-one supplement for the checks we run and the order we run them in.