Disclosure
PC Protection Ranking is supported by affiliate commissions. When you click a "Get" button or a link to a vendor's site and make a purchase, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. This is how the site stays free to read and how we fund the hands-on testing time each review requires, and we think you deserve to know exactly how that works.
How Affiliate Links Work
Most links to vendor websites on this site, including the "Get" buttons on review pages and the links inside comparison and best-antivirus articles, are affiliate links. If you click one and later make a purchase, typically within a set window defined by the vendor's own affiliate program, we receive a commission. The price you pay is the same whether you use our link or go directly to the vendor's site; commissions are paid out of the vendor's marketing budget, not added to your bill.
Why This Doesn't Affect Our Scores
These commissions do not influence our scores. A product's rank on our rating page comes from the same weighted criteria described on our methodology page, applied the same way regardless of whether that vendor pays a commission or nothing at all. We have, at times, ranked a lower-commission or no-commission product above one that pays more, because the formula does not know or care what the commission rate is when a review is being written.
How We Choose What to Recommend
We do not accept payment in exchange for a positive review, and we do not let a vendor preview or edit a review before it is published. When a company reaches out asking us to cover their product, that request goes into the same testing queue as everything else, with no guarantee of a favorable outcome or even inclusion, since some products we test do not end up meeting our bar for a full review at all.
Editorial Independence
The person writing a review and the business relationship with a vendor's affiliate program are kept separate on purpose. Our writers do not see commission rates while testing or scoring a product, and pricing or feature changes on a vendor's site trigger a review update regardless of whether that vendor participates in our affiliate program at all. If a product stops working well, drops a feature, or has a bad string of independent lab results, we update the review and the rating even if that product is one of our better-performing affiliate partners.
What We Never Do
We never let a vendor's advertising spend or affiliate commission rate override a testing result, we never publish a review written or edited by the vendor being reviewed, and we never remove a published review because a company asked us to after an unfavorable result, only because we found a factual error worth correcting. If a vendor threatens legal action or withdraws cooperation over a negative review, that review stays up unless we independently determine something in it was actually wrong.
Updates to This Policy
This page is reviewed alongside the rest of the site whenever our affiliate relationships change, and we date any material update so returning readers can see when something shifted. If we ever add a new type of monetization beyond affiliate commissions, such as sponsored content, it will be disclosed here specifically and labeled clearly on the article itself, not folded quietly into the existing affiliate disclosure.
Questions About This Policy
If anything here is unclear, or if you believe a specific piece of content does not live up to the standards described above, we want to hear about it. Questions about this policy, or about any specific review, comparison, or recommendation on this site, can go through our contact page, and we respond to every message personally rather than through an automated system.