Affiliate disclosure

The formal statement

Mud & Mat is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

This site's Amazon Associates tracking ID is mudandmat-20. It is the only affiliate program Mud & Mat currently participates in.

How the links work

• Every commercial link is marked `rel="sponsored nofollow noopener"` and opens in a new tab, per Google's link-spam policy.
• Links route through a resolver at `/go/`, which is excluded from search indexing. It exists so the destination for any product is a single configuration entry rather than something baked into the article text.
• Prices shown are live or absent. They come from the retailer data layer at render time. A price older than 48 hours disappears and the button falls back to "Check price on Amazon" rather than showing you a stale number.
• Every buy button carries an #ad marker and a link back to this page - not just the footer.
• Commercial pages carry an inline disclosure at the top rather than only in the footer, because FTC guidance is that a disclosure has to be where the reader will actually see it.

What commission does not change

This is the part that matters and the part you cannot verify from the outside, so here is what we commit to and how you can check it:

• Every roundup names a product we tell you not to buy. A comparison where everything wins is an advertisement. If you ever find a roundup here without a skip-this, that is a defect.
• We rank on published specifications, not on commission rate. The method is published in full on how we pick, so you can follow the sources and check whether the ranking follows from them.
• When we join other programs, buyer-first wins. If a brand-direct store is better for you on price, stock or warranty, that will be the primary button regardless of which pays more.
• We do not accept free product. Nothing on this site was sent to us, which is straightforward to guarantee given we do not test products at all.

Why only Amazon, for now

Because it is the only program this site has joined. We will not build a tracked link for a program we are not part of, which is a line some publishers cross quietly - and Amazon carries essentially every product in this category, so there is nothing we cannot cover.

As other programs are joined they will appear here and the disclosure will be updated. The link infrastructure is built so that switch is a configuration change, never a rewrite of a recommendation.

Cookies from affiliate links

Clicking an affiliate link sets a cookie in your browser from the retailer, which is how the retailer attributes a purchase to this site. Amazon's cookie for these links lasts 24 hours. If you buy something else at that retailer within the window we may earn a commission on that too, at no extra cost to you.

We do not set our own tracking cookies to follow you across the web. See our privacy policy for what this site does and does not collect.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or if you think a recommendation on this site looks like it was influenced by commission, tell us: info@mudandmat.com or the contact form. That is exactly the accusation this policy exists to be tested against.