Legal
Affiliate disclosure
Written now, before there is any money involved, because the time to set the rules is before there is an incentive to bend them.
There are currently none
WineHQ carries no affiliate links, no sponsored content, no advertising and no paid placements. Not a single affiliate URL exists anywhere in the source — commercial linking is a switched-off capability, and this page exists so the rules are on record before it is ever switched on.
The rules, if it is ever switched on
- Rankings are never for sale. No retailer can pay to appear in a recommendation, a comparison or a finder result, or to appear higher in one. The engines score on taste data and cannot see commercial relationships — they are not given them as an input.
- Disclosure at the point of use. A commercial link is labelled where it appears. A disclosure page that nobody visits is not disclosure.
- Suppressed in sensitive contexts. Commercial content is switched off entirely on fault pages, anywhere touching health, and in the alcohol sections. Someone worried their bottle is ruined is not a sales opportunity.
- No commercial influence on editorial. What is described, how it is described, and which faults and limitations are stated do not change because a link earns money. In particular, WineHQ will continue to say plainly when an expensive thing makes little difference — the glassware pages being the obvious case.
- One governed route. Every commercial link would pass through a single abstraction in the codebase, so disclosure, geographic suppression and sensitive-context rules are applied in one place rather than remembered page by page.
What WineHQ will not do
- Sponsored articles presented as editorial.
- Retailer-supplied tasting notes or descriptions presented as WineHQ’s own.
- Recommendations weighted by commission rate.
- Interstitials, pop-ups or anything that obstructs reading.
- Advertising targeted using behavioural profiles — which would in any case require collecting data the site does not collect.