Advertising disclosure

Where money is involved, this site says so at the place you are looking, not only here.

What can be paid for

ACI sells work, not position. Two things can be bought: a bounded verification — checking a stated list of claims against a stated evidence standard — and the ongoing maintenance of a record. Where category sponsorship exists, it buys a labelled placement and nothing else.

What payment can never change

Whether an offering is eligible for a situation.
What its positive and negative fit say.
Its documented limitations and its unknowns.
The order in which organic results appear.
Whether a correction from someone else is acted on.

This is enforced in the code, not only promised in prose: the data the matching engine receives has no field for commercial state, so a paid record and an unpaid one with identical facts produce identical results. See the methodology.

How paid placement is labelled

At the point it appears: A paid placement carries the word paid on the placement itself, adjacent to the content and legible without interaction — not in a footnote, not behind a tooltip, not in this page alone.
Not disguised as a result: Paid placement is never rendered to look like an organic result, and never visually dominant over one. It does not enter, reorder, or displace the result groups.
On the record itself: Every offering page states its commercial relationship in plain words — including “no commercial relationship on file”, so that the absence of a label is itself informative rather than ambiguous.
A check is not an endorsement: A paid verification is described as what it is: a check performed on a date, covering named claims, with what it did not cover stated. It is never presented as ACI recommending the offering.

What is archived

For every paid placement ACI keeps the sponsor, the placement, the period it ran, the creative, and the version of the disclosure shown at the time — so a past placement can be reconstructed rather than argued about.

Contract terms cannot buy silence