Affiliate Disclosure

This page is Sniff's full disclosure under the Federal Trade Commission's Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255). If you want a fast answer, the box above is it. The rest of the page is the receipts.

How the commission works

Most product pages on Sniff include a button to buy the food from a retailer like Chewy or Amazon. Those links carry a tracking parameter that identifies the click as coming from Sniff. If you go on to complete a purchase within the retailer's cookie window, Sniff is paid a small commission by the retailer. You pay the same price either way. The commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not your wallet.

Every link that earns Sniff a commission is labelled "Paid link" next to the button, every time it appears. We do this on every page, not just in the footer, because the FTC requires the disclosure to be where you can actually see it before you click.

Programs we participate in

The retailers and networks Sniff currently has active affiliate relationships with:

• Chewy (via Impact Radius). Commission paid on completed orders inside a 15-day click window.
• Amazon Associates. Pet category pays 3% of order value inside a 24-hour click window.
• Skimlinks. A network that auto-monetises outbound links to roughly 48,500 retailers. Used as a fallback where we do not have a direct relationship.

As Sniff grows, we will add direct relationships with subscription brands (Farmer's Dog, Ollie, Nom Nom) and pet insurance carriers. When we do, this list gets updated and the date at the top of this page changes.

The firewall between commissions and scores

This is the part that matters. A product scoring 87 and a product scoring 23 generate the same commission structure from the same retailer. There is no per-score multiplier. There is no pay-to-play tier. There is no brand budget that buys placement in our "highest-rated" lists. Affiliate income depends only on whether you buy something, not on what we said about it.

The methodology is rigid on purpose. Every score is computed from a published rubric (The Sniff System) that any reader can apply to any product and get the same result we did. If a brand or its agency contacts us asking to "review the score," "feature their product," or "remove a flag," we say no in writing and we add the request to a file. We have never accepted a payment of any kind from a pet food manufacturer, distributor, or trade group.

What Sniff will never do

• Accept money to inflate, soften, or remove a score.
• Accept money to feature a product in a "best of" list or recommendation.
• Accept money to bury or suppress a controversial ingredient flag.
• Accept free product, paid travel, or comped services from brands in exchange for coverage.
• Give a brand advance notice of its score before publication.
• Allow a brand to review or approve copy on its product page before publication.
• Run programmatic display advertising that targets readers based on the page they are on.
• Sell, rent, or share reader email addresses with any advertiser.

What Sniff does accept

• Affiliate commissions on retailer purchases, as described above.
• Reader newsletter subscriptions when (and only when) we launch a premium tier. The free tier will always include access to every score.
• Bug reports, correction requests, and editorial criticism from anyone, including the brands we cover. The corrections process is the same for everybody.

Editorial independence

Sniff is owner-operated and has accepted no outside investment, sponsorship, or advertising from any party in the pet food supply chain. The founder, Matt Gehring, does not own equity in any pet food company, holds no consulting contracts with any brand we cover, and is not employed by any manufacturer, distributor, retailer, or trade group.

If any of that changes, the disclosure gets posted here with a date before any related content is published.

Why we built it this way

The largest dog food review site on the internet was acquired by a pet care company for $9 million in January 2023. Affiliated brands now sit at the top of its "best of" lists. The site has never published a full methodology. We started Sniff because the alternative did not exist, and we are not going to recreate the problem we set out to solve.

Questions

If anything on this page is unclear, or you spot an affiliate link on Sniff that is missing its "Paid link" label, email [email protected]. We answer.

This disclosure is provided to comply with the Federal Trade Commission's Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) and applicable state consumer-protection laws. Last updated: 2026-05-21.