This site is funded by affiliate commission. That is a real conflict of interest, and the honest response to it is not to deny it but to write down the rules we work under, publish them, and let you judge the output against them.
Who writes this site
Articles on veratis.online are written and edited by Linda Jones, who is also the director of publication and the person legally responsible for the content. Every article carries a named byline, a publication date and a last-updated date. We do not publish anonymously, we do not publish under invented author personas, and we do not publish machine-generated text that nobody has read and checked.
If an article is ever substantially contributed to by someone else, that person will be named on it. Contact: info@veratis.online.
How we establish facts
The rules we apply, in order:
- Primary source first. For what a product includes — features, device counts, storage allowances, platform support — the vendor's own current product and plan pages are the source, and they are cited and linked.
- Independent laboratories for performance claims. Detection and performance figures come from testing organisations that publish their methodology and their raw data, principally AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives. We cite the specific test and its date. We never quote a detection percentage without also giving the false-positive count, because one without the other is meaningless.
- Legislation cited by instrument. Where we describe a legal right we name the directive or act and the article.
- Attribution, not assertion. If a figure comes from a vendor's marketing, we say so rather than presenting it as independently established.
- Hedge what we cannot verify. If we cannot confirm something from a source we can point you to, we either leave it out or say explicitly that it is unverified. We would rather publish a shorter article than a confident one that is wrong.
- The vendor prevails. Every article states that where our description and the vendor's own published information diverge, the vendor's information is the one to rely on.
How this site is funded
veratis.online earns affiliate commission. When a reader follows one of our partner links to a vendor or retailer and makes a purchase, that company pays us a percentage of the sale. We are paid by the retailer, out of their margin. The reader pays the same price they would pay going direct.
That is our entire income. Specifically, we do not take:
- Payment for a positive review, a particular score, or a place in a ranking.
- Display advertising from any network, so there is nothing on this site that tracks you.
- Sponsored articles, “paid partnerships” or advertorial presented as editorial.
- Payment to remove criticism, or to omit a product's limitations.
How we disclose it: a bar at the very top of every page; a disclosure box immediately beneath
the heading of any article containing commercial links, before any promotional content; a visible
“partner link” label on every single commercial button, including those in sidebars;
a note under each call to action stating that we earn a commission and that it costs you nothing
extra; and the rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" attribute on every commercial link,
which is the machine-readable form of the same statement.
Advertiser independence
No advertiser, affiliate network or vendor sees an article before it is published. None has any right of review, approval or veto over our content, and none has ever been given one. We do not send drafts to vendors for comment on their conclusions. If a vendor writes to us after publication, their message is treated exactly like any other correction request: we check the evidence, and we change the article only if the evidence shows we were wrong.
Commission rates differ between vendors. They play no part in what we recommend or in the order in which products appear. Where we think a cheaper product, a free built-in tool, or no purchase at all is the right answer for a particular reader, we say so — including where that costs us the commission. The review on this site's front page exists partly to demonstrate the point: it spends a full section listing what the advertised product does not include.
What we refuse to publish
These are firm rules, not aspirations:
- Invented testimonials. No fabricated reader stories, no "a reader wrote to us", no made-up quotes, no stock-photo faces attached to imaginary names.
- Invented ratings. No star ratings, scores or "editor's choice" badges that are not derived from a stated, published method. If we have not tested something, we do not score it.
- Artificial urgency. No countdown timers, no "offer ends tonight", no "only 3 left", no fake stock counters, no claims that a price will rise unless we can point to the vendor saying so.
- Guaranteed results. No claim that a product will make you safe, will stop every threat, or will guarantee any outcome. We will not write "100% protected" about anything.
- Fabricated statistics. No figure appears on this site without a source we can point you to. No invented user counts, market shares or infection rates.
- Fake independence. We do not describe ourselves as an independent test lab, a consumer association or an official body. We are an advertising-funded publisher, and we say so on every page.
- Scare copy. No claims that a reader's device is already infected, no imitation system warnings, no fake scan results.
- Impersonating a brand. We do not use vendor logos as though they were ours, do not imply endorsement, and carry a trademark disclaimer on every article naming a product.
Illustrations
Every diagram and illustration on this site is an original SVG drawn by us for the article it appears in. We do not use product screenshots, vendor marketing imagery or stock photography, both because that would raise trademark and copyright problems on an advertising-funded page and because a diagram we drew ourselves is one we can be held to. Each illustration carries real alternative text describing its content, an accessible title and description inside the file, and a caption that states what it shows and what it does not.
Updates and dating
Every article shows a publication date and a last-updated date. When we revise an article in a way that changes its substance, we update the date and, if the change corrects something we had previously asserted, we add a visible correction notice in the article itself rather than quietly editing the text.
Corrections procedure
We will get things wrong. When we do, this is what happens:
- Tell us. Email info@veratis.online with the page address, the statement you believe is wrong, and — if you have one — a source. Anyone may do this: readers, vendors, competitors.
- We acknowledge within five working days.
- We check it against a primary source. Vendor documentation for product facts, laboratory publications for test figures, the legal instrument itself for legal statements.
- If we were wrong, we fix it promptly and visibly. The text is corrected, the last-updated date changes, and a correction notice is added to the article saying what the article previously said and what was wrong with it. We do not delete errors silently.
- If we were right, we tell you why and point you to the source. A correction request from a vendor carries no more weight than one from a reader.
- If it cannot be settled — for example a genuinely contested figure — we note the disagreement in the article rather than picking a side we cannot defend.
A worked example is visible on the front-page review, which carries a correction notice recording that an earlier version of it wrongly credited Norton AntiVirus Plus with a VPN, dark web monitoring and five-device coverage.
Reader privacy as an editorial decision
We collect nothing about you: no cookies, no analytics, no pixels, no third-party requests of any kind. This is an editorial choice as much as a legal one. A publication funded by advertising has an obvious incentive to measure its readers, and we have chosen the version of this business that does not. It also means we have no audience data, which is a cost we accept. See the privacy policy and the cookie policy for how to verify that claim in your own browser.