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Are 'Best of' Lists Sponsored? We Audited 43 Pages

By The Ask Shopi Team · 6 min read

Open almost any "best [product] of 2026" article and you'll see confident picks, star ratings, and big "Check price" buttons. Here's a fair question to ask before you trust the ranking: are 'best of' lists sponsored — does the page get paid when you click?

So we ran a small, informal audit to find out how often "best of" pages earn money from the links they recommend — and, more usefully, to show you how to check any page yourself in about a minute.

This isn't a takedown. Affiliate funding is legal, extremely common, and often pays for genuinely good work. The point is narrower: incentives shape recommendations, so it helps to know when an incentive is in the room. A page earning a commission doesn't make its advice wrong — it just means you should read the ranking with that in mind.

What our audit found: are 'best of' lists sponsored?

We examined the outbound links on 43 fetchable "best of" pages spanning 8 product categories. Across that sample:

• 81% of pages carried at least one affiliate tracking link.
• The average page had about 21 affiliate links on it.
• 100% of the pages that used affiliate links also showed a disclosure somewhere on the page.

That last number deserves credit. Every page we could read disclosed its affiliate relationship in some form. Disclosure is exactly what regulators and good publishers ask for, and the sites in our sample did it.

We also logged which affiliate networks showed up most often across the pages:

Many pages used more than one network at once, which is why those counts add up to more than the number of pages.

Methodology and limits (please read this part)

Be skeptical of our numbers too — including these. This was an informal audit, not a peer-reviewed study, and the sample is small.

• We attempted 48 pages and successfully fetched 43. Five could not be read — they were unreachable or rendered their content with JavaScript in a way our fetch couldn't capture — so we excluded them.
• 8 categories is a thin slice of everything people shop for.
• "Affiliate link" here means we detected known tracking parameters or affiliate-network domains in the outbound links. We did not verify payouts, contracts, or whether any brand paid for placement.
• A page having affiliate links tells you nothing, by itself, about whether its picks are good. Plenty of excellent guides are affiliate-funded.

So treat "81%" as "in our 43-page sample" — not "81% of the entire internet." We're publishing it anyway because the value is in the method: you can run the same check and decide for yourself.

How to check any "best of" page yourself

You don't need our audit. You can inspect outbound links in under a minute:

1. Hover over a "Check price" or product button and look at the status bar in the bottom-left of your browser (or long-press on mobile). If the URL routes through go.skimresources.com, prf.hn (Impact), anrdoezrs.net / dpbolvw.net (CJ), awin1.com, or linksynergy.com (Rakuten), it's an affiliate link.
2. On Amazon links, look for a tag= parameter (for example, tag=something-20). That's the Associates tracking ID.
3. Right-click → "Copy link address" and paste it somewhere to read the whole thing. Tracking tags like utm_, ref=, aff=, or subid= are common tells.
4. Search the page (Ctrl/Cmd+F) for "affiliate," "commission," or "we may earn." A disclosure confirms the funding model — and its absence is itself worth noting.

None of this means "don't buy." It means you'll know whether a click pays the publisher, and you can weight the recommendation accordingly.

Affiliate funding isn't the villain

It's worth being fair here. Affiliate revenue funds a lot of careful, hands-on reviewing. The Wirecutter, for example, does extensive lab and real-world testing, and earns roughly 6-10% of a sale when readers buy through its links. The testing is real; the funding is disclosed. Those two things can coexist.

The risk isn't disclosure — it's when the incentive quietly bends the ranking: when the highest-commission product drifts to the top, or when "best" really means "best among the brands in our affiliate program." You usually can't see that from the outside, which is why the honest move for any publisher is to keep how they make money separate from how they rank.

Reviews carry their own caveat. University of South Florida research summarized in 2025 suggests roughly a third of online reviews may be unreliable or fake — a reminder that star ratings aren't ground truth. The FTC's 2024 rule now bans fake and incentivized reviews outright, which should help over time, but it's still smart to read critically.

If you want the mechanics, we wrote two companion pieces: how affiliate marketing shapes recommendations and how honest product reviews and affiliate links can coexist.

How Shopi is built differently

We took the incentive out of the loop. Shopi earns nothing when you click a product. There are no affiliate links, no ads, and no commissions anywhere in our recommendations, and we never sell your data. When Shopi suggests something, it shows you a plain-language "why this is for you" and a relevance score, and outbound links go straight to the product page, with no affiliate tags or tracking.

Our only revenue is an optional subscription. You can use Shopi free — $0 for 10 searches a month — and Premium is $3.99/month or $29.99/year if you want more. (Our no-signup demo runs on a sample profile, so it shows how Shopi works rather than results tailored to you.) You can read the full breakdown on why Shopi is different.

The honest takeaway

Most "best of" pages in our small sample were affiliate-funded, and every readable one disclosed it. That's not a scandal — it's the business model of a large part of the web. The useful skill isn't suspicion; it's knowing how to check, so you can tell the difference between a guide that happens to earn a commission and one whose ranking is shaped by it.

If a recommendation engine with no affiliate links sounds refreshing, you can try Shopi free — no signup needed for the demo. And if you'd rather keep using your favorite review sites, now you know exactly which links to hover over first.

Cite or embed this finding

Found this useful? You're welcome to cite our numbers with a link back, or drop the summary card straight onto your page:

<iframe src="https://shopvisorai.com/embed/affiliate-audit.html" width="540" height="300" loading="lazy" title="Shopi affiliate-link audit" style="border:0;max-width:100%"></iframe>

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution to Shopi. We have no affiliate links ourselves — so if our number helps your readers shop with clearer eyes, that's the whole point.