Affiliate Disclosure

The Short Version

Most cheese sites earn on the click, which gives the writer a quiet reason to steer you toward whatever pays. That reason does not exist here, because no link on this site pays anything.

The rest of this page is the detail behind that, plus what we commit to if it ever changes.

Every Way This Site Could Earn, and Where Each Stands

The table covers the full set of ways a publication like this one takes money. Only the first row is active.

If a row in that table changes, this page changes on the same day, and the change is dated at the top.

Affiliate Links

KnowTheCheese carries no affiliate links. Nothing on this site pays a commission when you click it or buy through it.

The site is not in the Amazon Associates programme or any other referral programme, so there is no tracking parameter to strip off a link before you follow it.

That may change one day. If it does, three things happen before the first paying link goes live.

• The programme gets named here first. You would read the name of the programme, the start date, and which kinds of article carry the links, before any of it went live.
• Every paying link gets marked in the article that contains it. Not in a footer, not in a sidebar, and not only on this page.
• The disclosure sits above the first paying link. You will not scroll past four recommendations before finding out which ones earn.

You will never find a paying link here that is not labelled.

Where the Outbound Links Actually Go

The links inside articles point at the evidence rather than at a checkout.

Typical destinations are protected designation of origin documents, dairy board publications, food science research, and government food safety pages.

None of those pay anything, and several of them are the reason an article contradicts a popular claim.

The terms of use cover what an external link does and does not imply.

What Advertising Can and Cannot Buy Here

Google AdSense fills the ad slots, and Google decides which ad goes in which slot based on its own targeting rather than on anything we sell.

An advertiser cannot see an article before it publishes, cannot ask for a change afterwards, and cannot buy a mention inside the text.

The ad slots sit outside the article body, and the writing pass never knows what will land in them.

AdSense is the only ad network on the site, and the ads.txt file names that one publisher ID. An ad claiming any other seller is not authorised, and reporting one to us is genuinely useful.

What Google collects to select and measure those ads, and how to switch personalisation off, is set out in the privacy policy.

Where the Money Actually Comes From

AdSense pays on impressions and clicks in the ad slots, so income tracks how many people read a page.

A commission model pays on purchases, so income tracks how many people buy after reading. Those two incentives pull the writing in different directions.

Under the first one, the useful move is to answer the question properly, because a page that answers it gets read and linked and found again.

Under the second one, the useful move is to delay the answer until after the buy button, and to prefer the version of the answer that has something to sell.

That is the practical reason this site has stayed on ads while the affiliate rows in the table above sit empty.

It also means an article that concludes you do not need to buy anything costs us nothing to publish.

What Gets Turned Down

Offers arrive most weeks, and they arrive in a small number of recognisable shapes.

• Paid link insertion. Someone asks to add one link to an article that already ranks, usually for a flat fee. Declined every time.
• Guest posts with a buried commercial link. The article is free, and the payment is the link. Declined.
• Sponsored reviews. A brand offers payment for coverage, sometimes framed as a product loan. Declined.
• Paid inclusion in a list. A request to be added to a comparison or a best-of list for money. Declined.
• Buying the whole site. Declined, and it would be disclosed here before anything changed hands.

None of these has been accepted, which is why every row in the table except the first reads as empty.

How We Choose What to Recommend

Something appears in an article because it solves the problem the section is about, and the article says what that judgment rests on.

Where we have used a thing ourselves, we say so and describe what happened.

Where we have not, we say that too, and we name what the recommendation stands on instead: published testing, materials, dimensions, published specifications, or a maker's record over time.

A recommendation with no reason attached is not a recommendation, and it should not survive an edit.

The editorial policy covers how sourcing and corrections work across the site.

How to Check Any Food Site, Including This One

Disclosure pages are easy to write and easy to ignore, so here is how to test one against the articles it claims to cover.

• Hover a product link before clicking. A URL carrying tag=, ref=, aff=, or a redirect through a tracking domain is a paid link, whatever the surrounding text says.
• Look for the disclosure above the first link, not below the last one. A disclosure at the bottom of a 3,000-word list is technically present and practically hidden.
• Check whether every option in a list is buyable from one retailer. That is usually the programme choosing the list rather than the writer.
• See whether anything is ever recommended against. A site that has never told you to skip something is not testing anything.
• Read the ads.txt file at the root of the domain. It names every ad seller the site authorises, and ours names one.
• Check whether the reasons are specific. A real reason names a material, a measurement, or a failure. A paid one names an adjective.

Apply all six to this site. If any of them turns up something this page does not describe, we want to hear about it.

Common Questions