Sponsored Content Policy

1 The one rule this page exists to state

Paid placements are clearly labelled and kept separate from editorial rankings. Payment never changes verification, test results or recommendations.

Squarespell sells visibility. It does not sell rank, verdicts, ratings or a place in Recommended sorting. Those are produced by testing and are not available for purchase at any price.

This separation is enforced in the code, not only promised here. Every commercial field is on a firewall list that the ranking calculation cannot read: an attempt to read one throws an error rather than returning a value. The list and the failure are covered by an automated test that runs on every change.

2 What counts as sponsored or paid visibility

Anything a creator has paid for, or given anything of value for, in order to be seen more prominently on Squarespell. If money, credit, free product beyond what testing requires, or any other consideration changed where something appears, it is a paid placement and it carries a label.

These are not paid visibility and are never labelled as such:

• A product ranking well because it tested well.
• A product appearing in a collection, comparison or solution because it fits the subject.
• An affiliate link, which is a commission on a sale rather than a payment for position. Affiliate relationships have their own disclosure and are described on the Affiliate Disclosure page.
• A product Squarespell owns and sells, which is disclosed as a Squarespell Original.

3 Sponsored Launch and Featured Creator

Two kinds of promotional inventory exist. They are separate products and are labelled differently.

Both are time-limited. Both are bought against a start and end date, and both stop being shown when that end date passes.

4 Where a paid placement may appear

A paid placement may appear in a promotional surface that is visibly separate from an editorial list, alongside the product or creator it concerns.

A paid placement may never do any of the following:

• Move a product up or down Recommended sorting, or any other editorial ordering.
• Add, remove or alter an Editor’s Pick.
• Change a verification status, a test result, a rating, a recorded limitation or a compatibility note.
• Displace an editorial result so that it appears to be one.
• Appear without its label.

At the time of writing there is no promotional module on the site. This section describes the rules a placement will be built under, so that the rules exist before the inventory does rather than after.

5 The exact labels we use

Labels are words, never colour or an icon alone, and they sit next to the thing they describe rather than only in a policy page.

A product can carry more than one at once. A sponsored product that we also earn commission on shows both labels, because both facts are true and a reader is entitled to both.

6 What payment cannot buy

Buying a placement does not buy acceptance into the catalogue, a recommendation, a rank, a rating, a passing test, traffic, clicks, leads or sales. None of those is on sale and none is guaranteed.

A sponsor may point out a factual error, a wrong version number, a feature that has since shipped, a price that has changed, and we will check it and correct it if they are right. A sponsor may not approve, suppress, delay or rewrite an independent finding.

If a product fails a compatibility test, that result stays visible under the ordinary editorial methodology for as long as it is accurate, whether or not the creator is paying for a placement at the time. A campaign does not pause a finding.

How testing works, and what a verification status means, is described on the verification page.

7 Dates, expiry and removal

• Every campaign carries a start and an end. Before the start it is Scheduled and nothing is shown.
• Between them it is Active and the label appears.
• Once the end passes it is Expired: the label disappears on its own, without anyone remembering to remove it.
• An administrator can Pause a campaign, which hides the label immediately and leaves the dates alone.

Expiry removes promotional eligibility and nothing else. The listing stays published, its tests stay recorded, its rank is unchanged, and its affiliate relationship, if it has one, is unaffected. A campaign ending is a commercial event, not an editorial one.

8 Sponsorship and commission together

A creator may sponsor a placement on a product that we also hold an affiliate relationship with. That is allowed, and both relationships are disclosed together rather than one standing in for the other.

Commission is described in full in the Affiliate Disclosure.

9 What we will not promote

We decline promotional work, at our discretion and without owing an explanation, where the product or the claim is one we would not want a reader to act on. That includes:

• Claims we cannot check, or that the creator cannot evidence.
• Guaranteed-results, guaranteed-ranking or guaranteed-income claims.
• Products that misrepresent what they do, who made them, or what platform they work on.
• Products distributing another party’s work without a licence to do so.
• Anything that would put a reader’s site, data or customers at risk.
• Anything unlawful where we operate, or in breach of the platform it plugs into.

Declining to promote something is separate from declining to list or test it, and neither decision is affected by whether money was offered.

10 Measurement, and what a number here means

Where we report on a campaign, we report what we can actually observe and we say what the number is.

• Automated, duplicated and obviously invalid traffic is excluded from any figure we give.
• We count outbound clicks ourselves through a redirect on our own server, and we exclude automated and duplicated requests from that count. Where a figure comes from a destination’s own reporting rather than ours, we will say so. Our click count and a merchant’s will rarely match exactly, and we do not present ours as the merchant’s.
• A figure is a description of what happened. It is not a forecast and not a promise of what a future campaign would do.

No analytics provider is installed on this site today. Nothing here should be read as a claim that we hold a measurement capability we have not built.

11 Booking, cancellation and refunds

Squarespell does not currently sell promotional packages. There is no price list, no checkout and no promotional order form on this site.

When packages exist, the commercial terms, price, duration, cancellation and any refund position, will live in the separate order or agreement that is actually signed for a campaign. They will not be invented on this page.

This page therefore makes no refund promise, and no statement here should be read as one. What it does commit to is the labelling, separation and expiry rules above, which apply to any campaign whatever its commercial terms turn out to be.

12 Reporting a missing or wrong label

If you find a placement that looks paid and is not labelled, or a label that looks wrong, tell us and we will check it. A missing disclosure is a defect and we would rather hear about it than not.

Write to info@squarespell.com with the page address and what looked wrong.

13 Changes to this policy

The date and version at the top of this page change whenever the substance does. A campaign is governed by the version that was published when it was booked, which is why the version is stated rather than only the date.

Information we hold about creators and campaigns is described in the Privacy Policy.