Affiliate Disclosure

Last updated: April 2026

What an Affiliate Link Is

An affiliate link is an ordinary link to a third-party retailer or service — Amazon, Chewy, Lemonade Pet, 23andMe Pets, and similar — with a tracking identifier attached. If you click that link and buy something on the destination site within the retailer's cookie window, Pet Care Helper AI receives a small commission from the retailer. The price you pay is the same as if you had arrived at the retailer directly. Commissions are paid by the merchant, not by you.

Affiliate links are how most independent pet-care publishers fund their writing. We use them because they let us keep the site free, keep paywalls off our health content, and avoid the kind of intrusive advertising that slows pages down.

How to Spot Our Affiliate Links

Affiliate links on this site fall into three buckets, and we label all of them:

• Direct affiliate links. Manually placed links to a specific product or service. These appear inside articles where a recommendation is being made (for example, a pet insurance guide, a breed-specific food review, or a product comparison). We mark affiliate content with language like “This post contains affiliate links,” “partner link,” or an rel="sponsored" attribute on the anchor tag.
• Skimlinks-converted links. We use Skimlinks, a publisher tool that automatically converts certain plain merchant URLs into affiliate URLs across the site. If an article mentions a store we do not personally partner with, Skimlinks may still route the click through an affiliate program on our behalf. Skimlinks disclosure is listed in our Privacy Policy.
• Display advertising. Ad units served by Google AdSense and other networks listed in our ads.txt file are clearly visible as ad creative. These are not editorial recommendations. We do not control which specific ad appears in a slot; those decisions are made by the ad network based on their own targeting rules.

Who We Partner With

The site maintains a curated list of partner programs across the pet-care ecosystem. Category examples include:

• Food and treats: fresh-food delivery services, breed-specific kibble brands, prescription-diet retailers
• Pet insurance: a handful of major US and international insurers offering accident, illness, and wellness cover
• Tele-vet services: licensed video-consultation platforms
• Pharmacy and prescription delivery: Vetsource, Chewy Pharmacy, and similar
• DNA tests and health diagnostics: at-home genetic screening kits for dogs and cats
• Training and behavior platforms: online courses, certified-trainer directories
• Walking, boarding, and daycare: marketplace and local-service platforms
• GPS trackers and smart devices: collars, cameras, water fountains
• Exotic and small-animal supplies: reptile habitat gear, aquarium equipment, small-animal enclosures

We do not maintain affiliate relationships with prescription pharmaceuticals, controlled substances, or any product that a veterinarian would normally prescribe or administer in person.

The Firewall Between Commerce and Health Guidance

This is the part that matters most. The revenue side of the site is deliberately separated from the editorial side by three rules we have been following since launch:

1. Commissions never change a health or safety recommendation. If a product with an active affiliate relationship conflicts with the peer-reviewed veterinary literature on a topic, the veterinary literature wins. We will tell you not to buy something we earn commission on if the evidence says so.
2. Advertisers cannot suppress content. No partner has the ability to request removal of a page, a warning, a negative review, or a symptom-triage step. Our Editorial Standards page documents the workflow that keeps this firewall intact.
3. Health and emergency pages are not monetized in the body. Symptom, emergency, and medical pages display only passive display-ad slots, not direct affiliate CTAs. Our Medical Disclaimer explains which categories are treated this way and why.

Practically, this means a guide on grain-free feeding will tell you that the FDA is still investigating DCM associations even though some of our food partners sell grain-free lines. A guide on pet insurance will recommend checking policy exclusions before buying a plan we get paid to promote. A reptile husbandry page will tell you that a cheap pet-store kit is undersized for the species even if we would earn a commission on upgrading.

The FTC and What We Are Required to Do

Under the US Federal Trade Commission's Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255), publishers who receive any form of compensation from a product or service they recommend must disclose that relationship clearly and conspicuously. We meet that obligation in three ways:

• A sitewide footer link to this page, visible on every article
• Inline disclosure at the top of articles that contain direct affiliate links, positioned before the first commercial recommendation
• rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" tagging on individual affiliate anchor elements, which allows search engines and content-classifiers to recognize the commercial relationship

If you ever find a page that you believe contains an undisclosed affiliate link, email us at advertise@petcarehelperai.com and we will correct it within one business day.

Non-Affiliate Revenue

In addition to affiliate income, we generate revenue from:

• Display advertising served through Google AdSense and the ad networks disclosed in our ads.txt file.
• Direct sponsorships are accepted on a case-by-case basis. Any sponsored article on this site will be labelled “Sponsored” at the top of the page and in the byline. We have not published a paid sponsored article in the current calendar year.
• Media licensing and syndication through the materials outlined on our Press Kit and Partners pages.

What We Do Not Do

• We do not accept payment in exchange for positive reviews.
• We do not accept free products in exchange for coverage without disclosure.
• We do not use dark patterns, fake countdown timers, or manipulated scarcity messaging on product pages.
• We do not rewrite or soften a warning on a health page because an advertiser requested it.
• We do not maintain affiliate relationships with any product category where a commission could plausibly put an animal at risk (for example, DIY prescription-substitute supplements).

If a Partner Asks Us to Do Something We Won't

Occasionally a partner will ask for a “tweak” — softening a warning, moving a competitor mention lower in the article, or removing a caveat. Our policy is simple: we either push back and keep the editorial as-is, or we end the affiliate relationship. When that happens, the affected article is updated within one business day and the partner is removed from our program list. We do not document individual terminated partnerships publicly because they tend to be resolved quietly.

Questions, Corrections, and Complaints

If you want to flag an undisclosed link, report a misleading recommendation, or ask how commission changes the framing of a specific guide, reach us at advertise@petcarehelperai.com or through our Contact page. Corrections are added to the affected article with a visible note, not quietly pushed.

Full details of how we research, verify, and maintain content are on our Editorial Standards page. The legal boundaries of what this site can and cannot offer are spelled out in our Medical Disclaimer and Terms of Service.

Last updated: April 2026 • Paul Paradis, Founder • Boston, MA