Advertising & ownership disclosure

This page exists so you can weigh our verdicts knowing exactly how we make money and where our interests lie. It is written to satisfy the FTC's requirement that material connections be disclosed clearly and conspicuously — and our own standard, which is stricter.

Affiliate commissions

Proven SEO Tools participates in affiliate programs for some of the tools we review. When you click a link marked as affiliate (affiliate links on this site route through our /go/ redirects) and later purchase, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Commissions fund the research this site runs on.

Commission size never affects a score. Tools we earn nothing from are scored with the same rubric as tools that pay the highest rates, and where a free tool is the honest answer — as with measurement — we say so.

Ownership of RankFlywheel

Proven SEO Tools is operated by the maker of RankFlywheel, an SEO automation platform. This is a material conflict of interest whenever RankFlywheel appears in a comparison, so we handle it three ways: the ownership is restated inside any report that mentions RankFlywheel; those reports state plainly which buyers RankFlywheel is the wrong choice for; and RankFlywheel is never assigned a score, because we cannot judge our own product impartially.

How reports are produced

Reports are research syntheses. We do not run hands-on lab tests, and no report claims otherwise: verdicts are built from vendor documentation, release history, and the documented experience of practitioners, weighed under our published methodology. Research and drafting are AI-assisted; every report is reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the named author — an operator who runs SEO systems in production daily — before publication. We do not publish invented statistics, fabricated first-person anecdotes, or claims we have not verified.

What vendors cannot buy

Reviews, scores, rankings within roundups, or removal of criticism. Vendors are welcome to flag factual errors or point us at documentation; anything we take from a vendor is treated as a vendor claim and credited as such in the report.

Contact

Corrections, tool suggestions, and vendor inquiries: hello@rankflywheel.com. Corrections are acknowledged in the affected report, not silently edited.