Affiliate Disclosure

The disclosure

This statement is made in line with the US Federal Trade Commission's Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising (16 CFR Part 255), and with the disclosure rules of the affiliate programmes we take part in. Equivalent rules apply elsewhere — UK CAP Code guidance on affiliate marketing, for instance — and this page is written to satisfy all of them.

How affiliate links work

An affiliate link carries a tag identifying PawLabs as the referrer. When you follow one, the retailer sets a cookie on their own site. If you then buy something, the retailer pays us a small percentage of the sale.

• You pay nothing extra. The commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not your price.
• We do not see your purchase. Networks report totals — how many referrals converted, and the commission owed. We are not told who you are or what you bought as an individual.
• You can opt out entirely by blocking third-party cookies, or by searching for the product yourself instead of using our link. Nothing on this site is gated behind an affiliate link.

What data those cookies involve is set out in the Privacy Policy.

What it does not affect

This is the part that matters, because an affiliate site that lets commissions steer its recommendations is worthless to you. Ours cannot, structurally:

• Trait scores. All 14 scores on every breed profile come from published kennel club standards and veterinary health data. There is no commercial input to a number on this site, and no way to buy a higher one.
• Breed Match quiz results. Your match is produced by scoring your answers against every published breed, then having an AI pick from the highest-scoring shortlist. No breed is weighted up because it is commercially convenient, and no advertiser can buy a place in your results.
• Which breeds we cover. We profile breeds because they are recognised breeds, not because there is money attached to them. Plenty of profiles here have no commercial upside at all.
• What a profile says. Every profile names the breed's weaknesses and says who should not get it. Nobody pays to have that softened.

We do not publish sponsored posts dressed up as editorial, we do not accept payment for placement in a comparison, and we do not let a brand approve copy before it goes live. If that ever changes, this page changes first and the arrangement is labelled on the page it affects.

How we label links

Where a page carries affiliate links, it says so at the top of that page — not only here. Outbound commercial links carry rel="sponsored nofollow", which is the machine-readable version of the same disclosure and what Google asks publishers to use.

The intent is that you should never be surprised. If you clicked a link and did not realise it was commercial, we have done this badly and we would like to know: contact@pawlabs.org.

Advertising

We may also show display advertising. Ads are served by third-party ad networks, which may use cookies to choose what to show you. Ad networks have no involvement in editorial decisions — no advertiser sees a page before it is published, and no advertiser can have one changed.

You can control ad personalisation through Google's My Ad Center and through your browser's cookie settings. See the Privacy Policy for what is collected.

Why we do it this way

Someone has to pay for 200-odd researched breed profiles, and the realistic options are a paywall, advertising and affiliate commission, or selling reader data. We have picked the middle one and ruled out the third — see the Privacy Policy, where we say plainly that we do not sell personal information.

That leaves one thing worth protecting: your reason to believe the ratings. A trait score is only worth reading if it was not for sale. That is the line, and this page exists so you can hold us to it.

Questions about any commercial relationship on this site go to contact@pawlabs.org. We will answer them.