Disclosure & Editorial Independence

Transparency about how this site makes money, and how that funding does — and doesn't — affect our reviews. We'd rather spell this out plainly than bury it in a footer link nobody reads.

The Business Model, Plainly

Best PC Protection earns commissions when readers click through affiliate links and purchase a product. This is standard for independent review sites and helps fund our testing lab, software licenses, and the analysts' time that goes into every review. You pay the same price whether you buy through our link or go directly to the vendor — the commission comes out of the vendor's marketing budget, never added to your bill.

The Wall Between Sales and Scoring

Affiliate relationships never determine a product's score, rank, or whether it appears in a "best of" list at all. The analyst running a product's testing pass doesn't reference commission rates while scoring it, and a vendor can't pay to improve a review, remove a listed con, or skip our testing process entirely. We've published scores where a product with no affiliate relationship outranks one that pays a commission, because that's what the lab results showed.

What We Accept From Vendors

We sometimes receive complimentary licenses from vendors specifically for testing purposes, since buying every plan of every product we cover at full retail price isn't realistic for a small team. Accepting a free license for testing never changes how that product is scored, and we say so here rather than pretending every review is funded purely out of pocket.

How Rankings Are Actually Determined

Every score comes from the process described in full on our Methodology page — hands-on testing against consistent, published criteria, applied the same way to every product regardless of its business relationship with us. A product we've never spoken to and a product we have an active affiliate partnership with go through the identical lab process, get evaluated by the same team, and are held to the same bar.

What Changes a Score (And What Never Does)

A score changes when a product's underlying software changes — a new detection engine, a pricing update, a version that measurably degrades performance. A score does not change because a vendor requested it, because an affiliate agreement was renewed or ended, or because a competitor complained about a comparison. If you ever notice a review that reads like it was softened for commercial reasons, that's exactly the kind of thing we want to hear about.

Free Products & Review Samples

Occasionally a vendor sends a product for review without any request attached. We treat these exactly the same as a product we sought out and paid for ourselves — same lab, same criteria, same reviewer pool, and the same willingness to publish an unflattering result if that's what the testing shows.

Corrections and Disputes

If a vendor disputes a published score, we re-check the specific claim in question against our own testing notes and correct anything we got factually wrong. We do not soften a conclusion, remove a negative finding, or adjust a ranking simply because a company disagrees with the result — a correction only happens when the underlying facts genuinely changed or we made an error.

Reporting a Concern

If you believe a specific review reads like it was influenced by a commercial relationship rather than by the testing behind it, tell us which one and why through our Contact page. We take that kind of report seriously precisely because our whole model depends on readers trusting that the money side and the scoring side don't touch.

Questions

If you have questions about a specific review, a specific score, or how our funding model works in a case not covered above, reach out via our Contact page — we respond to every message personally, not through a template.