The short version: Some of the links on Digital Moat are affiliate links. If you sign up for or buy something through one, we may earn a commission — at no extra cost to you. It never changes what we recommend, and we don't take payment in exchange for a positive review.
Digital Moat is free to read. We support the site through affiliate partnerships with some of the identity protection, privacy, and security tools we write about. When you click through one of our links and sign up or make a purchase, the company pays us a small commission — the same way a magazine earns money from the ads next to its articles, except our "ads" are just the tools we'd point you to anyway.
Our full reasoning lives on the How We Choose Tools page, but the short version: we start from the problem a reader actually has, look at what genuinely solves it, and only then check whether an affiliate relationship exists. The order matters — we don't start from "what pays" and work backward.
Affiliate links show up in a few places: comparison and "best of" articles, tool recommendations inside our checklists and guides, and occasionally in email content tied to a specific recommendation. Educational content — breach explainers, scam breakdowns, our security score quiz results — stays free of affiliate links unless a specific tool is genuinely part of the fix.
We only recommend products in categories we believe are worth paying for in the first place — identity protection, privacy tools, and cybersecurity software that address real, common risks. We update this page and our recommendations as our partnerships change, and we'll never let a commission structure talk us into recommending something we wouldn't use ourselves.
Questions about a specific recommendation or this policy? Contact us — we're glad to explain the reasoning behind any specific pick.