Disclosures

This page states how ZBS Index makes money and what money can and cannot buy. It is written before any of it is sold, on purpose: rules written after the first offer are not rules.

Current status

As of now this site carries no advertising, no affiliate links and no paid placements, and no vendor has paid for anything on it. When that changes, this page changes first, and every affected link is marked where it appears rather than only here.

What money will never buy

A position in any listing. An order of results. The wording of a test conclusion. The removal of a failure, an error or an unflattering measurement. The suppression of a competing entry.

Listings are ordered by observable facts, and the ordering rule is published above the list it applies to. If a payment could change that order, the ordering rule would be worthless and so would the catalog.

What money may buy

Inclusion in a test that would otherwise not have been run, and a rerun after fixing something we found. Both are labelled on the resulting page, with the same protocol, the same budget and the same publication of failures as any other run.

Advertising and affiliate links, each marked as such next to the link, never inside a ranking or a conclusion.

Evaluation on a company’s own data, which is private work and is not published unless the customer asks for it.

Corrections

If a field is wrong, the source we cite is the place to fix it, and the next sweep picks up the change automatically. If a source is right and we recorded it wrong, that is our error and we fix it in the pipeline rather than by hand-editing a page, so the same error stops happening.