Affiliate disclosure

This page is required by FTC guidelines on disclosing material connections. Read it once; it applies to every product link on the site.

How Water Filter Finder earns money

Water Filter Finder participates in affiliate marketing. When you click a product link on this site and complete a qualifying purchase at the retailer's site, Water Filter Finder earns a commission. The commission is paid by the retailer or brand, not by you — your price is the same whether you arrive at the retailer through Water Filter Finder's link or by typing the retailer's URL directly.

We do not accept payment from manufacturers for editorial placement. Brands cannot pay to be added to our "best" lists or to appear in our comparison articles. Editorial selection is independent of which program pays more. See /methodology for the selection criteria we actually use.

Programs and networks we participate in

The retailers and affiliate networks we currently work with, or plan to apply to once the site is live:

Amazon Associates — for replacement-filter cartridges and certain pitcher/faucet products. Commission rates are set by Amazon per product category (Kitchen, Health & Personal Care, Home Improvement) and disclosed in their public Operating Agreement.
Aquasana via Rakuten Advertising (LinkShare) — for Aquasana whole-house, under-sink, and softener systems. Program managed by PartnerCentric.
APEC Water via Impact.com — for APEC reverse osmosis, whole-house, and softener systems.
Waterdrop via Impact.com or in-house publisher portal — for Waterdrop reverse osmosis and countertop systems. Where we cite Waterdrop's NSF/ANSI certifications, we include the caveat that Waterdrop products are not listed in the NSF DWTU or WQA Gold Seal databases as of our verification date; see /methodology for why this matters.
iSpring referral coupon — for iSpring reverse osmosis systems. iSpring's program is a customer-referral coupon (first-purchase only, US addresses only, $100 minimum order), not a standard cookie-tracked affiliate; we disclose this directly anywhere iSpring appears.

We do not publish specific commission rates from any of these programs. Networks like Impact.com and Rakuten Advertising disclose commission terms to publishers post-application; republishing those rates would breach standard publisher agreements. We treat affiliate rates as internal operational data, not editorial content.

What this means for our recommendations

A few things you can hold us to:

Our recommendations would not change if the commission rates across our partners were rebalanced tomorrow. We frequently recommend Aquasana even though APEC is on the same page with similar specs, and vice versa — selection is driven by certification coverage, price-tier fit, and editorial judgment about what genuinely answers the page's question.
We do not write "best of" lists where the ordering is set by commission. If we recommend Brand A as the top pick, it's because Brand A is the strongest answer to the article's specific question — not because Brand A pays more.
We do not write paid review content. Every editorial page on the site is independently produced. We do not accept sponsored posts.
We do disclose when a specific page leans heavily on one program. Pages comparing Aquasana to a competitor will say so; pages recommending an iSpring coupon will explain the coupon mechanics, not bury them.

What we don't do

To make our affiliate stance fully concrete:

We do not invent customer quotes or aggregateRating numbers to support a recommendation.
We do not link to a product we couldn't actually verify as available and matching the description.
We do not cite NSF/ANSI certifications we cannot anchor to NSF DWTU, WQA Gold Seal, or (with a caveat) IAPMO.
We do not publish award-style recommendation badges that aren't backed by a documented selection process.

Cookie and tracking note

When you click an affiliate link, the retailer (Amazon, Aquasana, APEC, Waterdrop) sets a tracking cookie in your browser that lets them attribute a subsequent purchase to Water Filter Finder. We do not see or store the contents of that cookie. The cookie typically expires within 24 hours to 30 days depending on the program; if you purchase outside that window, no commission is paid to Water Filter Finder and your purchase is unattributed.

If you'd rather not be tracked through one of our links, you can navigate to the retailer's site directly — your purchase price is the same either way.

How to flag a problem

If a product link is broken, points to a wrong item, or makes a claim that looks misleading, email contact@waterfilterfinder.com. Include the page URL and the problem. We aim to respond within a week and publish corrections with a date stamp.

Version

This affiliate disclosure was published on the Water Filter Finder launch date and is versioned at v1.0. Material updates are dated and logged on this page.