Disclosure & Editorial Independence
Transparency about how this site makes money, and how that funding does — and doesn't — affect our reviews.
How we make money
ShieldLabs earns commissions when readers click through affiliate links and purchase a product. This is standard for independent review sites and helps fund our testing lab, licenses, and staff time.
What affiliate links don't do
Affiliate relationships never determine a product's score, rank, or whether it's included in a "best of" list. A vendor cannot pay to improve a review, remove a con, or skip our testing process.
How rankings are determined
Every score comes from the process described in our Methodology — hands-on testing against consistent criteria. Products we don't have an affiliate relationship with are tested and ranked the same way as those we do.
Free products & samples
We sometimes receive complimentary licenses from vendors for testing purposes. This never influences scoring, and we disclose it doesn't change our process.
Questions
If you have questions about a specific review or our funding model, reach out via our Contact page.
Why We Think Disclosure Matters More in This Category
Antivirus affiliate commissions can run unusually high compared to other software categories, which is exactly why we think a site that doesn't clearly separate its revenue model from its scoring shouldn't be trusted blindly — including this one. We'd rather you judge that separation by checking whether a high-commission product's real weaknesses actually show up in its review, not just by whether we admit affiliate links exist on the page.
The Actual Mechanism Behind the Separation
The people who run our tests and write our reviews don't have visibility into which affiliate deals generate the most revenue for the site, and no one's compensation is tied to how a review performs commercially after publication. This isn't a policy we simply state — it's a structural separation between the testing team and the business side, specifically so no one writing a review has a personal financial stake in inflating a particular product's ranking.
What Happens When a Partner's Product Has a Real Problem
If a product we have a commercial relationship with has a genuine drop in independent lab performance, a documented security incident, or a pattern of aggressive upselling, that gets reflected in the score and called out in the review text the same way it would for a product with no affiliate relationship at all. We'd rather lose a partnership than publish a review we know is inaccurate.
What We Never Do
We never accept payment in exchange for a guaranteed positive review, a specific score, or a placement in a ranked list. We never let a vendor preview or approve review copy before publication. We never remove or soften a documented con because a product is a commercial partner. If you ever find language on this site that reads like it was written by a vendor's marketing team rather than an independent tester, that's a mistake worth reporting through our Contact page.
How We'd Handle Sponsored Content, If We Ever Ran It
As of now, ShieldLabs doesn't run sponsored posts or paid placements of any kind — every review, comparison, and best-of list exists because our editorial team chose to test that product, not because someone paid for coverage. If that ever changes, sponsored content would be clearly and separately labeled, and it would never be folded into our scored rating system.
Keeping This Page Accurate
We update this disclosure any time our funding model or editorial process meaningfully changes, so it reflects how the site actually operates rather than a policy statement we wrote once and left untouched. What you're reading is current as of our latest content update.