TRANSPARENCY  How Clean Living Lab stays independent  ·  No pay-to-play reviews

Transparency · Updated April 2026

How we make money.

The short version: when you click a link on this site and buy something, we may earn a commission — at no extra cost to you. Here's the long version, because you deserve to know exactly how that works.

The one-sentence answer

Clean Living Lab is a reader-supported publication. Many of the outbound product links on this site are affiliate links. If you click one and complete a purchase, we may earn a small commission from the retailer. You never pay more because of it.

What "affiliate link" means

An affiliate link is a tagged URL that tells a retailer — Amazon, Aquasana, Waterdrop, AquaTru, and so on — that you arrived at their site from ours. If you buy something within that retailer's tracking window, they pay us a small referral fee. That fee comes out of their marketing budget, not your wallet. The price you see is the price you pay.

What it does not change

Commission rates are not how we pick products. We've turned down brands that pay more because the product didn't hold up in testing. We've recommended products that pay us nothing (including several on our "Best For Renters" list) because they were genuinely the best fit for a reader's situation. And we will call out a product's weaknesses even when we're an affiliate for it — you can see examples on the Best Under-Sink PFAS Filters page, where every pick has a "Cons" column.

How we mark affiliate links

Every affiliate link on this site carries a rel="nofollow sponsored" attribute, which is the standard signal to search engines that a link is a paid placement. Monetized pages — any page with a "Buy" or "Check Price" button — carry a short inline disclosure near the top so you're never surprised.

Programs we participate in

This list is current as of April 2026. If we add or drop a partner, we update this page.

The conflict-of-interest test

Before a product goes on a "best of" list, one editor asks: would I recommend this to my parents? If the answer is no — or even "only if they had a very specific kind of water problem" — it either gets cut or moved to a narrower scenario page. Commission rate does not enter that conversation.

Free samples, sponsored content, and gifts

We sometimes receive free products from brands for testing. Accepting a sample never guarantees a positive review, and we disclose it on any page where we tested a gifted unit. We do not run sponsored posts, paid placements inside rankings, or "brand partnerships" that influence rank order. If a page is sponsored, it will be labeled Sponsored at the top. As of this writing, zero pages on this site are sponsored.

FTC compliance

This disclosure is published in accordance with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR Part 255 ("Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising"). We aim to make our disclosures clear, conspicuous, and near the top of every monetized page — not buried in the footer.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you spot an affiliate link that isn't properly disclosed, email us at editors@cleanlivinglab.org. We read everything.