Editorial policy

The wall

Money buys attention, placement, and a labelled page. Money never buys a score, a ranking position, or a verdict.

That sentence is enforced, not just asserted. Paid articles and notes live under /sponsored/, never /blog/. Every paid unit carries a label,rel="sponsored" on every outbound link, and is excluded from every roundup and ranking. A test in our build (scripts/check-sponsored-integrity.mjs) fails if any of that stops being true, and the site does not ship when it fails.

A competitor cannot buy space on your review page. The only paid things that can ever appear on a tool's review page are that tool's own vendor's Vendor Plus block and a note that its review was commissioned. No advertiser, slot or sponsored link for a rival product is ever placed there, and the same build test fails the site if one is.

What is for sale, and where it appears

5 paid products, and nothing else. Each is listed with the one place it appears and what it can never buy. Prices are on the rate card. The weekly email, Scored this week, is not for sale and carries no paid content.

• Expedited Review

  Appears: On the tool's own review page with a Commissioned review note, in the public ledger, and in any roundup where it ranks (the roundup says so).

  Never buys: A better score. The review is published whatever the score is, and a re-review can lower it.

• Vendor Plus

  Appears: On your own review page only, below the verdict, under the label Vendor Plus. Nowhere else, and nobody else's page.

  Never buys: A verified or quality label, or any change to the score, the order of a list or whether you are listed.

• Category Slot

  Appears: In a Sponsored block below the score-ordered list on one category page. Never inside the ranking, never on a review page.

  Never buys: A place on any vendor's review page, a place in a roundup, or a way to hide a competitor.

• Sponsored Note

  Appears: At /sponsored/notes/, listed on /sponsored/, in the sponsored RSS feed and in the ledger. Never on /blog/.

  Never buys: A spot on /blog/, a score, a rank or the word best.

• Sponsored Article

  Appears: At /sponsored/, in the sponsored RSS feed, on X, LinkedIn and Facebook, and in the ledger. Never on /blog/.

  Never buys: Text you write, a score, a rank or the word best.

Free for every vendor, with nothing to buy: claiming a listing and correcting a factual error about your own product.

Scores are not for sale, and the price list proves it

You can pay to move to the front of the review queue. That is the only paid product that creates a review, and it buys our attention rather than our approval: the score comes out of the same five criteria as every other tool on the site, it is published whatever it turns out to be, and a later re-review can lower it.

A paid review is marked as such on the tool page, appears in the ledger below with its score, and remains fully eligible for roundups, because it is real editorial that competed on merit. Where a roundup includes a tool whose review was commissioned, the roundup says so.

What nobody can buy, at any price: a change to a score, a position in a ranking, the removal of a review, or a veto over a verdict. The scoring and roundup code is forbidden, by a build test, from reading who is a customer or has an affiliate programme.

What Vendor Plus means

Vendor Plus is a subscription for the vendor of one tool. It adds a block under that tool's verdict, on that tool's own page only, labelled Vendor Plus, holding the vendor's own response and links. That block is the vendor's voice, marked as such, and the score above it is ours.

It is not a verified badge, a quality mark or an endorsement. It does not change the score, the order of any list, or whether the tool is listed, and the badge on a page always equals its rating. If the vendor stops paying, the block goes and nothing else about the page changes.

How Category Slots work

• At most 2 slots per category, rotating. They sit in a block marked Sponsored below the list, which stays in score order and is computed before any slot is placed.
• A slot is never inside the ranking, never in a roundup and never on a review page.
• Its link carries rel="sponsored" and it appears in the ledger below.
• It cannot hide, demote or reorder a competitor, because nothing in the list or on their pages reads the slot.
• The categories we refuse (below) have no slots.

Links and commissions

Paid links are always rel="sponsored". No exceptions, and it is stated on the rate card before anyone pays. This is Google's own qualifier for paid links. It means we are not selling search rankings.

Commission disclosure. Some tool pages link to a vendor through an affiliate URL, and we earn a commission if you sign up through it, at no extra cost to you. A commission is not a placement payment, is not in the ledger, and never influences a score, a ranking position or whether a tool is reviewed. Those links are disclosed on the page that carries them and also carry rel="sponsored".

Everything else is a normal editorial link, chosen because it is useful.

Who we refuse

Published so refusal is a policy rather than a mood:

• CFD, spread-betting and binary-options brokers. Regulated financial promotions. We are not FCA authorised and will not carry them.
• Proprietary trading firms and funded-trader programmes. Same regulatory exposure, and the business model preys on the same audience.
• Token sales, presales and yield products. Unregistered securities risk, and we cannot verify the claims.
• Pharmaceuticals, supplements and health claims. We cannot verify medical claims, so we will not host them.
• Essay mills and academic ghostwriting. The product is dishonesty.
• Payday lending and debt consolidation. Regulated credit promotion aimed at people least able to absorb a bad deal.

On finance specifically: we link to non-promotional research, statistics and data pages, and never to a broker signup, an account-opening path, a broker comparison table, or any URL whose purpose is routing a reader toward opening a trading account. scored.tools is not FCA authorised and nothing here is a financial promotion.

We may refuse any placement, before or after payment, and refund it in full. The one exception is the verdict on an Expedited Review, which is non-refundable once started, because the work is the product and the verdict is not. If we cannot take it on or do not publish in time, it is refunded in full.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, email hello@scored.tools and we will fix it. Substantive corrections to an article are noted on the article rather than made silently. A vendor may correct a factual error about their product at any time, free, through the correction form. A vendor may not correct our opinion of it, and a correction never changes a score by itself: the score moves only if the facts under it do.

Public sponsorship ledger

Every payment scored.tools has taken for placement, in one table, generated from the published pages themselves. Notes, articles, expedited reviews, category slots and Vendor Plus periods each get a row.

Generated from published content on 2026-09-18. Want to be in this table? The rate card is public.