About PC Protection Ranking
PC Protection Ranking started from a simple frustration: most antivirus comparisons online are written by the products they are compared against, or by affiliates who only get paid when you click "buy." We wanted a place where a score comes from the same criteria every time, regardless of which company runs the biggest ad campaign that quarter or offers the highest commission.
We test each product ourselves, track its results across multiple AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives rounds rather than a single snapshot, and revisit reviews whenever a vendor changes its pricing or feature set. Nothing on this site is static: a product that scored well eighteen months ago is checked again before we keep recommending it, and a product that used to disappoint gets a second look if it has genuinely improved.
How We Test
Every product goes through the same process before it appears on this site. We install it on real hardware, not a virtual machine configured to make scanning look faster than it is, and we run it for at least two weeks before writing anything. During that window we track boot time, background CPU and memory use, and how much a full scan slows down everyday tasks like opening a browser or copying a large file.
On the protection side, we do not run our own malware samples against live systems; that risks contaminating results and is not something a small independent team can do safely or at the scale professional labs manage. Instead, we cross-reference every product's real-time and on-demand detection rates against the latest published rounds from AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives, two of the only labs whose testing methodology is public and repeatable. Where the two labs disagree, we say so in the review rather than picking whichever number looks better.
Our Editorial Standards
Some of the links on this site are affiliate links, and we say so plainly on our disclosure page. That relationship never changes what we write. We do not accept payment for a positive review, we do not let a vendor preview or edit a review before publication, and a product's rank on our rating page is calculated from the same weighted formula every time, whether or not that vendor pays a commission on a sale. If a company that pays a higher commission also happens to score lower on protection or performance, it still ranks lower. We would rather lose a few dollars in commission than publish a rating we do not believe in.
We also correct mistakes publicly. If a reader flags an error in a review, whether it is an outdated price or a factual mistake about a feature, we investigate and update the article with a note about what changed and when, rather than quietly editing the page and pretending it was always accurate.
Which Products We Cover
We focus specifically on consumer and small-business antivirus and internet security suites, not enterprise endpoint platforms sold through sales calls and custom contracts, since those are a different buying decision entirely with a different audience. Within that scope, we prioritize testing products that are widely available, actively maintained with regular updates, and realistically something a reader could sign up for today. A product that has been abandoned by its vendor, or one only sold through a reseller with no public pricing, will not show up in our rating table even if it was well regarded years ago.
Methodology, Briefly
Every score out of 10 combines protection rate, performance impact, features, pricing and support, weighted toward protection and performance since those two factors determine whether a product actually does its job. The full breakdown, including exactly how much each criterion is worth and how often we revisit a score, is on our methodology page.