Independence

Every dog food recommendation you find online has a financial motive behind it. Sites that look independent are owned by retailers. Sites that look scientific are funded by manufacturers. Influencers get free product. The $60 billion pet food industry spends more on marketing than on nutrition research, and the recommendation layer that sits on top of all of it has been compromised for years.

Sniff started because the honest version did not exist. We are not going to recreate the problem we set out to solve.

What that means in practice

Sniff has never accepted, and does not currently accept:

• Investment from any pet food manufacturer, distributor, retailer, or trade group.
• Sponsorship, advertising, or paid placement of any kind.
• Affiliate commissions on retailer purchases. Product pages have no "buy" links and no tracking parameters that earn Sniff revenue.
• Free product, comped services, or paid travel from any brand we cover.
• Payment to inflate, soften, remove, or pre-screen a score.
• Brand previews of any score before publication.
• Programmatic display advertising. We do not run ads on Sniff, period.
• Reader data sales. Email addresses, browsing behaviour, and preferences are not for sale.

The founder, Matt Gehring, does not own equity in any pet food company, does not consult for any brand we cover, and is not employed by any manufacturer, distributor, retailer, or trade group. If any of that changes, the change gets posted here with a date before any related content publishes.

Why no affiliate links right now

Most independent review sites monetise through affiliate commissions. They argue the rate is flat, the firewall is real, the methodology is published. All of that can be true and the site is still a commerce layer first and an editorial layer second. The visual hierarchy gives it away. The "Buy on Chewy" button is always bigger than the score.

We chose to build the universe instead.

Sniff is becoming a map of canine biological reality. The genetic similarity rail on every breed page. The within-breed disease prediction work. The foundation embedding that will let every dog find their position in a navigable model of the canine genome. None of that needs an affiliate link next to it to make sense. Putting one there would cheapen what the platform actually is.

So we removed them.

If affiliates ever come back

We may add affiliate partnerships in the future. If we do, three things will be true on the day they go live:

• The same rate for every product. No per-score multiplier. No brand tier. A product scoring 87 and one scoring 23 generate identical commission structure.
• A published charity split. A defined percentage of every dollar Sniff earns through affiliate commissions will route through the Pax Pledge. The percentage will be posted here, the recipients will be named here, and the annual contribution will be reported here.
• The visual hierarchy will not change. The score and the editorial reasoning will always be the headline. Any commerce surface will be subordinate to the science.

The Pax Pledge is the affirmative half of independence. It is for the dogs who do not have someone reading labels for them. Shelter dogs eating whatever was donated. Rescue dogs in underfunded organizations stretching every bag. Dogs in communities where the nearest vet is an hour away and the nearest good food is further.

But feeding them is not enough. Every dog that passes through this platform teaches us something about what dogs need. Which breeds thrive on which nutrient profiles. Which genetic backgrounds carry which sensitivities. Which ingredients matter most at which life stages. That knowledge does not stop at the subscription line.

The platform's job is to take what this community has taught us about canine nutrition and put it to work for the dogs who need it most. The same science. The same rigor. The same care. Regardless of whether anyone is paying for it. Independence from advertisers and retailers is what makes that possible. Bringing affiliates back later means extending the pledge, not abandoning it.

Funding right now

Sniff is owner-funded by the founder. Operating costs come out of personal savings and non-Sniff income. The platform infrastructure runs on credits granted by Cloudflare, AWS, Google, Nebius, NVIDIA Inception, and Weights and Biases under their startup programs. Compute for the foundation embedding work comes from a Lambda Labs research credit grant.

The platform will eventually need to pay for itself. When that happens, the model will be independent of advertising and independent of conflicted commerce. Likely paths: a research subscription, a per-dog genomic report, or a grant from an organization aligned with the science. Each of those gets evaluated against the same test: does this introduce a conflict we cannot disclose our way out of? If yes, it does not happen.

Editorial independence

Every score is computed from a published rubric (The Sniff System) that any reader can apply to any product and arrive at the same number. If a brand or its agency contacts us asking to review the score, feature the product, or remove a flag, we say no in writing and add the request to a public file.

Anyone can challenge a score. Brands, veterinarians, owners, researchers. The corrections process is the same for everybody, the response window is the same, and every change Sniff makes in response to a correction gets logged with a date.

Questions

If you spot a conflict of interest we have not disclosed, an affiliate link we missed when we pulled them down, or a brand relationship we should have surfaced, email [email protected]. We answer.

Affiliate links removed and this page rewritten on 2026-05-26 as part of the universe-first launch. The prior version of this page lives in the git history at github.com/Sniffscore/sniff. Last updated: 2026-05-26.