Squarespell policy
Affiliate Disclosure
Last updated
What this covers, in short: some outbound links earn us a commission, every one of them is labelled, and none of them can change a rank, a verdict or a limitation we found. The detail is below.
1 What this means in one paragraph
Some of the links on Squarespell earn us a commission. If you follow a labelled link and buy something, the seller may pay us a share. That is how a good deal of the site is funded.
It changes nothing about what we say. Commission cannot move a product up a list, turn a failed test into a passed one, remove a limitation we found, or get a product recommended. The ranking code is not permitted to read a commercial field at all, attempting it raises an error, and an automated test proves it still does.
2 What it costs you
Normally nothing. An affiliate link usually costs the same as going to the seller directly.
We say "normally" deliberately: the price, the terms and any discount belong to the seller, not to us. They can change them without telling us, and we cannot guarantee a price you see here is the price you will be charged. Check the seller’s own page before you buy.
Where a creator has given Squarespell readers a discount code, that is stated on the product page as a discount. It is a separate thing from commission and does not change anything in this section.
3 How a link is labelled
Wherever a commercial relationship exists, it is named next to the thing it applies to, on the product card, on the product page, and beside the button you would actually press. A disclosure that only exists in the footer is not a disclosure.
| Label | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Affiliate link | We may earn a commission if you buy through it. |
| Squarespell Original | We make and sell this. The money is ours directly, not a commission. |
| Sponsored | The creator paid for this placement. Not the same as commission. |
| Featured Creator | The creator paid for promotional visibility. |
| (no label) | An ordinary editorial link. We earn nothing from it. |
A product can carry two of these at once, most often Affiliate link and Sponsored. When both are true, both are shown. One never substitutes for the other.
Outbound commercial links carry rel="sponsored" and open in a new tab, so search engines and assistive technology are told what the link is as well as readers.
4 What commission cannot do
- It cannot change whether a product is listed.
- It cannot change a verification status or a test result.
- It cannot change a rating, a limitation, a compatibility note or a caveat.
- It cannot change a position in Recommended sorting or any other editorial order.
- It cannot get a product into a collection, a comparison or an Editor’s Pick.
What does decide those things is described on the verification page.
5 What happens after you click
An outbound link takes you to somebody else’s website. From that point the seller controls the transaction, and we are not a party to it.
- Checkout, payment and any card details are the seller’s.
- Their privacy policy applies, not ours.
- Support, refunds, licence terms, updates and delivery are theirs to provide and theirs to honour.
- Any account you create there is with them.
If something goes wrong with a purchase made on another site, the seller is who can fix it. Tell us anyway, it is relevant to whether we keep recommending them.
6 Tracking windows and when a commission is actually earned
Each seller or affiliate network sets its own rules for when a referral counts: how long the attribution window lasts, what counts as a qualifying purchase, whether a refund reverses the commission, and whether the referral survives you visiting other sites in between. Those rules belong to them and can change without notice.
Practically, that means we often do not know whether a particular purchase earned anything, and we never know who made it. We receive settlement figures, not a list of buyers.
We do not name a specific affiliate programme or quote a commission rate anywhere on this site. Those are terms between us and a seller, they vary per product, and publishing a figure that later changed would be worse than publishing none.
7 What we check, and what we cannot
We check that outbound links work and record when they were last checked. What we cannot do is guarantee that the destination has not changed since, a price rise, a discontinued plan, a programme that closed, a page that moved.
If a link is broken or points somewhere unexpected, that is a defect on our side and we want to know.
8 Reporting a wrong or missing disclosure
If a link earns us a commission and is not labelled, or is labelled in a way that looks wrong, tell us. We will check it and correct it.
Write to info@squarespell.com with the page address and what looked wrong.
This page describes how the site actually behaves today. It is an operational document, not legal advice, and it should be reviewed by a qualified lawyer before launch.