Affiliate Disclosure

The headline

The HRT Index earns commissions when readers click through to certain providers we cover and become customers. This disclosure is published in accordance with the US Federal Trade Commission's Endorsement Guides, which require publications to clearly disclose financial relationships that could be material to a reader's evaluation of editorial content.

Which links are affiliate links

The “Visit [Provider]” buttons inside the provider review cards on our reports are affiliate links. The buttons are labelled with a small “sponsored link · we may earn a commission” microline beneath them. The buttons themselves carry an HTML rel="sponsored noopener" attribute so that search engines and AI systems correctly identify them as commercial links.

The byline area at the top of every report carrying affiliate links shows the disclosure microcopy and a link back to this page.

Inline links inside the body of an article, links in our editorial and trust pages, and links inside the footer are not affiliate links. Where a body link points to a provider's home page rather than through the affiliate path, it is for editorial context only and does not produce revenue for the publication.

How affiliate revenue does not affect rankings

Our rankings are determined by editorial judgement against the published methodology, not by commercial relationships. Specifically:

• We cover providers with whom we have no affiliate relationship where doing so makes the comparison more honest. The reader has a right to know about the relevant cohort, not just the part of it we can monetise.
• We do not accept payment in exchange for inclusion. We do not accept payment in exchange for a specific ranking. We do not accept payment in exchange for editorial copy.
• We are willing to remove a provider from coverage even when we hold an active affiliate relationship with them, if our editorial judgement requires it.
• Where a vendor partnership becomes material in some way other than a standard affiliate relationship — for example, a content partnership, a syndication arrangement, or any value-in-kind exchange — that fact is disclosed on the relevant page in addition to this site-wide disclosure.

How affiliate links work mechanically

When you click a “Visit [Provider]” button, a third-party affiliate network or the provider's own affiliate system may set a cookie on your browser to attribute a later signup to The HRT Index. The cookie does not contain personally identifying information about you. See our privacy policy and consumer health data privacy page for more detail.

Why we use this model

Independent editorial work has costs. Subscription models work for some publications; ad-revenue models work for others. For The HRT Index, affiliate revenue from providers we have evaluated and editorially endorsed is the model that lets us publish without paywalling content that we want women in this audience to be able to read freely. The integrity of that model rests entirely on the separation between revenue and editorial judgement — which is why we are explicit about how we hold that line.

Questions

If you have questions about how a specific link on the site works commercially, or about whether a specific page is influenced by an affiliate relationship, please reach us at our contact page.