Money, ours and theirs

Reached For intends to earn affiliate commission — a share of a sale when a reader buys through a link here, at no extra cost to the reader. Amazon Associates first, brand-direct programmes where they pay better.

Today the site carries no purchase links at all. That is a live count, not a rhetorical one: this page is built from the same database as the rest of the site and there are currently 0 offers in it. Nothing on this site has ever earned anything.

Three rules constrain it, and they are structural rather than promises:

A purchase link is attached to a product, never woven into a sentence. Offers live on the product card. No quote on this site contains a link to buy anything, and no sentence of ours is written around one. If a link ever appeared inside a quotation it would be an alteration of what somebody said.

Commercial interest cannot reach the evidence. What gets published is decided by whether a subject's evidence clears a threshold. There is no field anywhere that raises a product's standing because it can be bought through us, and no page is created because a product is profitable.

Objections are never trimmed to protect a link. 29.6% of the claims on this site are negative or mixed, and they appear at the same size, in the same type, in the same position as the endorsements — including on the products we would earn the most from.

Where a speaker states a commercial relationship, we record what kind it is and the verbatim words that established it, and the claim shows the label beside the speaker's name wherever it appears.

650 claims of 3418 carry a declared interest — 19.0% of everything here.

Suppressing a disclosed claim would be the easy-looking mistake, and it destroys evidence. A reviewer with an affiliate interest in a pan can still be the most knowledgeable person who has ever handled it, and their criticism of it is often the most valuable thing on the page precisely because they had a reason not to make it.

So disclosure is recorded as its own fact and is not folded into how confident we are that something was said, or into how strongly it was said. It does not lower a claim's rank, and it does not remove the speaker from the site. It travels with the claim to the place a reader is already looking when they weigh it.

When a brand's founder, staff member or official channel praises the brand's own product, that is a statement of intent by a manufacturer. It is worth reading — often it is the clearest account of why something was built the way it was — and it is not independent testimony, and we do not treat it as an endorsement.

43 claims from 7 speakers carry that label, appearing on 3 published product pages.

Here is the honest limit of that, stated because a reader would otherwise have to find it themselves: the label is on the claim, where you can see it. It is not yet subtracted from the counts. A page that says a product has six voices behind it is counting distinct speakers, and if one of those speakers works for the brand, that page is over-stating its independence by one. The fix is to count independent voices separately from all voices, and until that ships, the labels on the claims are how you check — not the number at the top.

No brand has ever paid to appear here, to be ranked here, or to have a claim removed, and we will not accept payment for any of those. Nobody sends us products, because we test nothing. There is no sponsored content on this site and no category of page that could hold any.

We run no advertising network, no third-party tracker and no cross-site identifiers. The site counts page views and how often readers click through to a merchant; that second number records a page path, a merchant and a product, and no identifier, IP address or destination URL. Nothing about you is stored, sold or shared. There is currently nothing to click through to.

A disclosure we missed is a factual error and we want to hear about it, in either direction — a paid relationship we failed to label, or a label we applied to someone who has no such relationship. Both are corrections, and the corrections page says how to send one and what happens next.