Sponsors can buy visibility. They cannot buy rank.

What you can buy

• A clearly labelled sponsored placement on the homepage or a category ranking.
• A placement in the newsletter.
• Display advertising in defined slots.

What you cannot buy

• A higher rank, in any category, at any price.
• Removal or suppression of a competitor.
• Changes to the scoring weights.
• Removal of a negative factor from your score breakdown.

Why you should believe that

Because it is not a promise, it is a property of the system. The scoring engine is a pure function whose input type describes plans, prices, benchmarks, incidents and votes. It has no field for a sponsor, an affiliate rate, or a commercial tier — so there is no value a sponsorship could set that would reach a score. A test in the suite asserts exactly this.

Every sponsored unit also renders the product’s real, unmodified rank beside the label. If a sponsor ranks sixth, the card says sixth. That is the point: a paid placement is a way to be seen, and readers can see precisely what they are being shown.

Details of the scoring system are on the methodology page.