How AI Leakage makes money, why no tool we rate or suggest is ever part of it, and how you can check.

The short version

We take no affiliate commission from any company whose products we assess. Not on the AI tools we rate. Not on anything suggested in a report, a course or an article. Not on supporting products such as backup, password managers or endpoint security. No company whose product could appear in a verdict of ours pays us anything, in any form, ever. We pay nobody for introductions to our own training either. A certificate holder can give someone a code that lowers the price they pay, and that is all it does. The details are below.

This is a rule rather than a description of where we happen to be today. The rating is the product, and a rating that can be bought is worth nothing to the person reading it.

Why we work this way

Most free guidance about business AI tools is published by a company that sells one. The advice is often good, and every recommendation in it still ends at the publisher’s own product. That is not dishonesty. It is the shape of the business model.

We wanted our answer to be able to end anywhere: at a competitor’s product, at a cheaper tier of something you already pay for, or at the conclusion that what you are using is fine and you should change nothing. None of those answers is fully available to a publisher paid per referral.

What this means in practice

• No link in a vendor profile is an affiliate link, on any tier, for any tool in our database.
• No tool suggested in a personalised report or in course material earns us anything, whether or not we have rated it.
• We take no commission on adjacent or supporting products either. This is a change from an earlier version of this page, which permitted commission on non-rated categories such as backup and password management. That allowance has been withdrawn.
• We are not a reseller and not a partner in any vendor programme. We pay nobody for introductions, on our own courses or anyone else’s. See Current arrangements below.
• Where we point to a tool we have not assessed, we say so plainly and cite the public source we relied on. An unassessed suggestion is a starting point for your own checking, not a verdict from us.

Current affiliate relationships

As at 30 September 2026. This page is updated whenever the position changes.

No vendor relationships. No paid introductions.

With companies we rate or suggest: none. There has never been one, and under the rule above there will not be one. There are no affiliate links to any third-party product anywhere on this site.

On our own courses: no paid introductions, from 30 September 2026. From 8 August to 30 September 2026 someone holding one of our certificates could be paid for introducing another person to our training. The arrangement was never used: nobody was paid and nothing was owed when it closed. We closed it because paying people to bring in buyers is close to the kind of arrangement our own courses teach people to recognise, and we would rather not be anywhere near it. A certificate holder can still give someone a code that lowers the price they pay. Nobody is paid for passing one on. Holders who train other people can buy their learners’ certification at a lower practitioner rate and charge for their own training however they choose. That is their business, not a commission from us.

If either position changes it will be stated here, dated, and on every page affected, before it takes effect.

How we do make money

From training and certification. The vendor database, the alerts, the policy template and the other free tools earn nothing by design. They exist to be useful and to be checked. What we sell is the training built on top of them, bought by the person or the business taking it.

The practical effect is that our revenue comes from the reader, not from the companies the reader is being warned about. That is the arrangement we think a publication like this one has to have.

Other commercial arrangements

We do not accept sponsored evaluations. A vendor cannot pay us to research their own product, on any terms. We withdrew that option in August 2026 because our position rests on revenue coming from readers rather than from the companies readers are being warned about, and that is a simpler and stronger thing to say without an exception attached to it. One arrangement remains, and it involves no vendor and no commission: a managed service provider or IT consultancy can license our vendor database, policy templates or audit method to use with their own clients. That is a customer buying a tool from us, and it does not touch how anything is rated. Terms are on the Methodology page.

How to check us

There are no affiliate links on this site, so the check is simple: any outbound link you find should go straight to the vendor’s own page with no tracking parameter attached to it. If you find one that does carry a tracking parameter, we have made a mistake and we want to know.

Corrections

If you believe a relationship is missing from this page, or a disclosure is missing from a page that should carry one, email info@aileakage.com. We will investigate and correct within five business days.