Editorial policy

scored.tools takes money from advertisers. This page says exactly what that money buys, what it cannot buy, and lists every payment we have taken. If the two ever disagree, the ledger is the part you should believe, because it is generated from the published pages rather than typed by hand.

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 live under/sponsored/, never /blog/. They carry a label above the headline, rel="sponsored" on every outbound link, andAdvertiserContentArticle markup so machines can tell too. They are excluded from every roundup, ranking and the homepage. 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.

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 touches 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, and it is published whatever it turns out to be. It is priced at $250 partly because a cheap price is itself evidence — nobody buys a verdict for $250.

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.

Links

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.

Affiliate links are disclosed on the page that carries them. Some tool pages link to a vendor through an affiliate URL and we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Affiliate relationships never influence a score, and most highly-scored tools here pay us nothing. Those links also carryrel="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.
Casinos, sportsbooks and gambling affiliates. Not our audience, and age-gated advertising we are not set up to handle.
Adult content. Not our audience, and it would make the site unsafe to open in the workplaces where most of our readers actually read it.
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 an Expedited Review, which is non-refundable once started, because the work is the product and the verdict is not.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, email [email protected] 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. A vendor may not correct our opinion of it.

Public sponsorship ledger

Every payment scored.tools has taken for placement, in one table, generated from the published pages themselves.

Nothing yet. scored.tools has not taken a placement payment. When it does, the row appears here the same day the page goes live.

Affiliate commissions are a different thing and are disclosed on the pages that carry them; they are not placement payments and do not appear here.

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