Affiliate disclosure

The one line version

Dog Brain Lab is reader supported. Some links on this site are affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you buy through one, at no extra cost to you. Every affiliate link is labelled as one, on the page it appears on. A commission never changes a verdict and never buys a recommendation.

That is the sentence in our footer, and it is the whole truth in short form. The rest of this page is the same thing with the working shown.

How it actually works

When you click an affiliate link on this site, you land on the seller's own page through a tracking link. That link tells the seller's payment processor where you came from. If you buy something, we get a percentage of that sale. If you do not, we get nothing, and nothing about your visit changes either way.

A few specifics, because vagueness is where disclosures go to die:

• You never pay more. The price is the seller's price. There is no surcharge, no markup, and no version of the product that costs less if you avoid us.
• A cookie does the tracking. Clicking an affiliate link sets a cookie on the seller's side so a purchase can be credited back to us, sometimes days later. That cookie belongs to them and lives under their privacy policy, not ours. We explain what that means for your data on the privacy policy.
• Every affiliate link is marked. They carry the attributes search engines use to identify paid links, they open in a new tab, and the page says in words that the link is an affiliate link. You should never have to guess which links pay us.

What we earn on

The main one, and for now the only one worth naming, isBrain Training for Dogs, a paid online program sold through ClickBank. It is the program behind most of the ads you have seen for tiring out a clever dog, we wrote a long review of it, and we earn a commission when someone buys through our link.

If we add other affiliate relationships later, they get the same treatment: named, labelled, and disclosed on the page where the link appears. This page gets updated when that happens, and the effective date at the top moves with it.

What a commission does not buy

This is the part that matters, so it is a list rather than a paragraph you can skim past.

• Nobody pays us to publish an opinion. We are not paid per post, per review, or per positive word. A commission only ever comes from a reader choosing to buy something.
• Sellers do not see our copy before you do. No vendor gets an approval pass, a preview, or a chance to soften a line.
• The paying product does not automatically win. Our review of the program we earn the most from contains a section on who should skip it and a recommendation to try the free version of the idea first. That section exists because it is true, and it stays whether or not it costs us sales.
• We do not invent proof. No fabricated testimonials, no invented ratings, no trainer persona with credentials nobody can check, no "thousands of happy owners" that came from nowhere. If a number is not real, it does not go on the page.

Researched, not tested, unless the page says otherwise

Every page on this site carries a stamp. "Researched, not yet tested" means we read the sources, checked the vendor's own material, and wrote carefully, but we have not run the thing with a dog ourselves. "Run with a dog" means we did, and the page will tell you which dog, what happened, and what did not.

We would rather admit the limit than imply a field test we never ran. Plenty of affiliate reviews are written by people who have never opened the product and never say so. That is the practice this stamp exists to refuse.

A review that has never met the product is not automatically worthless. A review that has never met the product and pretends otherwise is.

Why we use affiliate links at all

Because the alternatives are worse. Ads would mean handing the page over to whoever bids highest and letting trackers follow you around afterwards. A paywall would put free enrichment games behind a card form, which defeats the point of writing them. Affiliate commissions let the games stay free and let us be picky about what we link to, since we are not selling impressions to anyone.

It does create a real incentive, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. The honest position is that the incentive exists, we know it exists, and the countermeasures are the ones listed above: name the relationship, label the link, publish the reasons to skip, and never write a number we did not earn.

How to buy without paying us

Type the seller's address into your browser directly instead of clicking through from here. That is all it takes. If a review helped you make the decision and you would rather the commission went nowhere, that is entirely your call and we will not think about it again.

Before you buy anything

Prices, bonuses and refund windows move. Ours is not the page they move on. Check the current price and the current refund policy on the seller's own site before you buy, and treat any review, including ours, as a starting point rather than a receipt.

This disclosure is made in the spirit of the US Federal Trade Commission's guidance on endorsements and testimonials. If anything on this site looks like an undisclosed paid placement, that is a mistake and we want to hear about it: contact us.