How this almanac is paid for

Gumline Almanac earns money when a reader follows one of a small number of marked links and buys something. There are three of them. This page lists all three, what we know about what each pays, and the arrangement we declined — because a disclosure that only lists the deals you took is half a disclosure.

The three

Amazon. Waterpik and Philips do not run affiliate programmes of their own that we could find, so the only way to link either maker is through Amazon, where the commission is a low single-digit percentage of the sale. The button says Amazon rather than dressing itself up as the manufacturer's own shop.

BURST. BURST runs an affiliate programme through a network and pays per sale. It does not publish the rate, so we cannot tell you what a click is worth to us — only that it is worth something. We would rather say that than leave you to assume it is nothing.

A dental savings plan, on exactly one page: the entry about paying for a deep clean. It carries a sentence we will never separate from it, so here it is again: a dental savings plan is not insurance. It is a membership that buys a discounted fee schedule at dentists who accept that plan. There is no benefit to claim, no annual maximum and no cover, and if your own dentist is not in the network it is worth nothing to you at all. Check that before you pay for a year of it.

What we turned down

A second discount-plan programme was available to this site and is not on it. Its status in our own research file is an application, not an approval, and we take the view that an unapproved programme is not a link — it is a hope. If it is ever approved we will add it here with the date.

We will not link, name as recommended, or take a referral fee from any dental clinic or any company that sells clinic leads, here or anywhere on this site. Clinic referral money is the largest revenue available in this subject and it is the one we are least able to exercise judgement about: we cannot inspect a surgery, verify a licence or follow up on a reader's outcome, so we have no business steering anyone toward one for a fee.

We also take no money from the closed direct-to-consumer aligner brands or their successors, which is a refusal we inherited from the wider fleet and have no wish to reverse.

Why the free answer is still the headline

The top of our main commercial page recommends a manual brush, a fluoride toothpaste, and floss or interdental brushes. Not one of those three items earns this site a penny, and that recommendation appears above every paid link on the page rather than politely after them.

It is there because it is what the American Dental Association, the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and the HSE all describe, and because the point of this almanac is to be right rather than to be profitable. A water flosser is an aid for particular situations, not the next tier of oral health, and we say so on the page where we are paid to say otherwise.

The rules the money does not get to touch

A commission has never decided a placement here. Our comparison is a table of what manufacturers publish about their own machines, with the date we read each page — not a ranking, and not a set of scores, because we have tested nothing and will not pretend otherwise. The two machines in that table whose pages show no ADA Seal statement are listed as showing none, and one of them is a partner.

Every paid link is marked sponsored and nofollow, sits below a plain statement that it is paid, and search crawlers are told not to follow the redirect addresses at all.

Where the disclosure sits

Not only here. On any page carrying a paid link, the statement that we are paid appears above the link rather than underneath it in a smaller grey, because a reader who reads one line before clicking should read that one.