Transparency

How we earn money

Two sources, both non-financial.

• Advertising (display/AdSense). Visually separated from editorial content and labelled.
• Non-financial affiliate: charging cards, chargers, accessories, car rental, and the OEM configurator exit on currently-orderable models. A purchase via such a link may earn a fee; your price does not change. These links carry rel="sponsored" (or rel="sponsored nofollow") so the commercial relation is machine-readable.

Sponsored guides are possible but always disclosed up front and clearly labelled. A paid placement never appears as an editorial judgement.

What we deliberately do not do

• No listings aggregation. We show no individual offers and sell no cars.
• No lead-gen forms for leasing, insurance or financing.
• No lease affiliate (Justlease, Athlon, ALD): credit intermediation, Wft.
• No insurance affiliate (Independer, Promovendum): financial product, Wft.
• No lead-aggregator affiliate (Carwow, Heycar).
• No marketplace affiliate (AutoScout24, mobile.de, LaCentrale).
• No income input in tools and no "best choice for you" output.
• No explicit cost comparison framing one model as cheaper or better.

These limits are structural. They sit in the product, not just in the policy text. So no situation arises where a commercial partner benefits from a slanted figure.

Ratings stay independent of advertisers

Category ratings and specs follow the public methodology and its stated sources only. Advertisers and affiliate partners get no preview, no influence over a score and no way to have a figure adjusted. With insufficient data the score stays empty, even where that is commercially inconvenient.

Reviews: labelling (EU Omnibus)

Under the Omnibus Directive it must be clear whether a review comes from real users and whether it is verified.

• Owner reviews are submitted anonymously and moderated before publication. We do not pay for them. We edit only spelling and readability, never the sentiment or figure. We do not verify ownership, so they are not presented as verified purchases.
• Summaries of external sources are labelled as such, summarised transformatively and linked to the source. They are not first-party reviews and are not presented as such.

Reviews that do not pass moderation are not rewritten; they are simply not published. We pay nobody for writing a review.

Grounds for refusal: not verifiable or clearly not from an owner or user; abusive, unlawful or traceable to a person; advertising or spam.

Submitting is done through the review form. The form is anonymous and accepts an optional email for a possible verification question only.

How reviews weigh as rating input: see the methodology.

Independence

autoseeker is made by one person, for all markets. No per-brand paid content, no ghostwriters. Questions through colophon and contact.