Advertiser disclosure

The box at the top of this page is the disclosure that appears above the fold on every page of this site that shows a compensated offer, and in the header of every page that does not. It is the legally sufficient version. What follows is the version we would want if we were the reader.

Who pays Award Rate, and for what?

Credit card issuers pay us, through affiliate networks that sit between the issuer and the publisher. The payment is triggered by an approved application that the network can attribute to a click from this site. It is not triggered by the click, by an impression, or by anything we write.

There is no other revenue. No display advertising, no sponsored posts, no paid newsletter placements, no lead generation, no data sale, no consulting for issuers, no paid speaking, no paywall. If a page on this site is not earning affiliate commission, it is being paid for by the ones that are.

Which cards pay us, and which do not

Most sites in this category will tell you that “some” of the offers shown are from advertisers. Here is which ones. This table is generated from the card records themselves, so it is accurate by construction rather than by our remembering to update it.

What compensation affects — and what it cannot touch

A disclosure that says compensation “may affect how offers appear” without saying where is doing the minimum. These are the places it reaches, and the places it does not.

What happens when you click an apply link

Every apply link on Award Rate points at an address on our own domain rather than straight at the issuer or the network. That layer exists for boring operational reasons — it lets us move a card between networks or switch an offer off everywhere from one data field — but it also means your clicks are tracked, and you should know exactly how.

1. You click an apply button. It carries the markup search engines require for a compensated link, so no ranking signal passes through it. The destination is an on-site interstitial, not the issuer.
2. The interstitial records four things about the click. None of them describes you. The table below is the complete list — there is no fifth field.
3. A small beacon is sent to our own endpoint so the count survives your browser leaving the page. It contains the same four fields and nothing else. If the endpoint is unreachable the beacon is discarded and nothing else happens.
4. You are forwarded to the issuer or the network, usually within a frame of the page loading. From that moment you are on their site under their privacy policy, and the network sets its own tracking cookie on its own domain — not ours.
5. If you are approved, the network reports it to us in aggregate, as a count and a commission figure. We never learn which reader it was.

The interstitial itself is excluded from search indexes three separate ways — a robots directive on the page, a disallow rule in our robots file, and exclusion from the sitemap — because a tracking layer leaking into search results is both an SEO problem and a reader-experience one. Our privacy policy covers the rest of what we do and do not collect, which is very little.

Why some cards on this site have no apply button

You will find cards on this site with a full review, a score and a comparison row, but no apply button. That is deliberate and it happens for two different reasons, each labeled on the card itself.

Unpaid listings. 15 of the 17 cards here have no commercial arrangement at all. We cover them because a reader comparing this category needs them in the comparison, and leaving out the cards that do not pay is the most common way a comparison site misleads without ever writing a false sentence. They carry a label saying we earn nothing from them.

Withdrawn offers. When an issuer pauses or pulls an offer, as 2 issuers currently have, the apply link is switched off everywhere on the site at once. The card keeps its page and its analysis, with an honest note in place of the button. Sending a reader to an issuer page that no longer shows the offer we described is worse than sending them nowhere.

What Award Rate is not

Award Rate is a publisher. It is not a bank, a lender, a card issuer, a broker, or a financial advisor, and it is not licensed as any of those things. We do not accept applications, we do not make credit decisions, and we have no influence whatsoever over whether you are approved for a card or on what terms.

Nothing on this site is financial advice, and none of it is tailored to your circumstances. Approval, credit limits, rates and terms are set by the issuing bank, depend on your creditworthiness, and change without notice — the issuer's own pricing-and-terms page is always the authority, and every card on this site links to it directly.

We do not review every card available in the market, and the offers shown here may not include every offer available to you. A targeted offer in your own online banking, or one from a relationship you already have, may well be better than anything we can show.

How to hold us to this

Our editorial team writes and scores every review before any commercial arrangement is considered. Issuers do not review, approve, or endorse our content.

That claim is worth exactly as much as your ability to test it, so here is where to push. The per-card table above tells you who pays us. The editorial policy tells you when in the process the money becomes visible and to whom. The valuation methodology publishes the model that sets every dollar figure on the site, with its sample sizes — including the quarters where we cut a valuation and reduced the headline value of the cards that pay us most.

If you think a ranking here is bought, say so: editors@awardrate.com. The score, its rationale and the sort key that produced the order are all published, which means the argument can be had on the evidence. If you turn out to be right, the correction goes on the public log with your name on it if you want it there.