Affiliate disclosure
Last updated July 2026. BirdBench carries no affiliate links today. When it does, they will be labeled wherever they appear, and buying through one may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. Here are the rules that will govern them.
Where they will appear
When affiliate links arrive, they will sit next to gear recommendations — feeder types in the Seed & Feeder Matcher, and later seed and optics suggestions elsewhere. Every one will carry a disclosure line directly beside it. You will never have to guess whether a link pays.
They are also marked in the page markup itself with rel="sponsored nofollow", so search engines and tools can identify them automatically.
What the commission does not buy
- It does not affect tool output. The matcher ranks seeds and feeders by how many of your selected birds they serve — coverage math over a species dataset. There is no commission variable anywhere in that calculation, and the code is plain JavaScript you can read in your browser.
- It does not buy a recommendation. No sponsored posts, no paid placements, no "brands we love" arrangements. If a product appears here, it's because it's the right answer to the question.
- It does not change the advice to be more expensive. The honest answer to a lot of feeder questions is "the $12 one is fine," and that's what the page will say.
Why affiliate links at all
Hosting, domain, and time cost money. The alternatives are display advertising, which would mean third-party tracking scripts and slower pages, or a paywall on tools that ought to be free. Affiliate links keep the pages fast, ad-free, and free of trackers — which is the whole design of this site.
Your privacy when you click
Following an affiliate link takes you to the retailer's site, where their cookies and privacy policy apply. BirdBench receives only aggregate reporting from affiliate programs — order counts and commission totals — never your identity, your cart, or your browsing. See the privacy policy for the rest, which is equally short.
Current status
There are no affiliate links on BirdBench right now. The site is not enrolled in any merchant program, so nothing on any page earns a commission today. Rather than ship placeholder links that go nowhere, the tools simply don't render them.
That will change once real programs are in place. When it does, this page will name each one, and every link will carry the label and disclosure described above. This paragraph is the honest answer to "is this page monetized?" — check back here rather than taking a general disclosure at face value.
No affiliate links on the site today. When there are, they will be labeled, they will never influence what the tools calculate or what the guides recommend, and they will cost you nothing extra.