Affiliate Disclosure
Dental Coverage Guide participates in affiliate marketing programs. Some links on this site are affiliate links — if you click through and purchase a plan or take another qualifying action, we may earn a referral commission at no additional cost to you.
This disclosure is provided in accordance with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines on endorsements and testimonials (FTC 16 CFR Part 255), which require that material connections between a website and the products or services it mentions be clearly disclosed.
How Affiliate Relationships Work on This Site
When you click a link to a dental insurance carrier, plan comparison tool, or dental membership service on this site, that link may include a tracking parameter that tells the carrier’s affiliate program that the visit originated from Dental Coverage Guide. If you then purchase a plan or complete another qualifying action, we receive a commission.
The commission — typically a flat fee or a percentage of the first-month premium — is paid by the carrier or affiliate network, not by you. Your premium cost is the same whether you arrive through an affiliate link or go directly to the carrier’s website.
What Affiliate Relationships Do Not Affect
Commercial relationships do not determine what we recommend, which plans appear in our guides, or how we evaluate carriers. Specifically:
- Plans are not ranked by commission rate. A carrier that pays a higher commission does not receive a higher ranking, a more favorable review, or preferential placement in comparison tables.
- Carriers cannot pay for inclusion. If a plan performs poorly on our evaluation criteria — annual maximum, waiting periods, coverage percentages, network size — we say so, regardless of whether we have a commercial relationship with that carrier.
- Carriers cannot pay for exclusion. If a plan performs well, it appears in our guides regardless of whether we have an affiliate arrangement with the carrier.
- We do not accept sponsored content. All articles, guides, and comparisons on this site are written and reviewed by our editorial team under the standards described in our editorial policy. No carrier has reviewed or approved any article before publication.
Which Links Are Affiliate Links
We do not label individual affiliate links within articles. The nature of dental insurance content — where most useful links point to carriers or plan tools — makes per-link labeling impractical. Instead, we disclose at the site level, on this page, that affiliate relationships exist and that they do not influence our editorial recommendations.
If you want to visit a carrier’s website without using an affiliate link, you can type the carrier’s URL directly into your browser or search for the carrier by name.
How Affiliate Revenue Is Used
Commissions from affiliate relationships fund the research, writing, editing, and technical maintenance of this site. Dental Coverage Guide does not carry display advertising. Affiliate revenue is the primary way this site is supported financially.
We believe this model is more compatible with editorial independence than display advertising, which creates incentives to maximize page views regardless of content quality. Affiliate revenue is earned only when readers find our recommendations useful enough to act on them — which aligns our financial interest with the quality of the guidance we provide.
Questions
If you have questions about our affiliate relationships or want to know whether a specific link on this site is an affiliate link, use the contact page. We will respond within 5 business days.
For a full description of our editorial standards, sourcing methodology, and how we evaluate dental insurance plans, see our editorial policy.
