Affiliate & Ads Disclosure

Box Turtles is reader‑supported. We run ads, and a small number of our reviews include affiliate links. This page explains exactly which links are which, who pays us, and the rules we apply to ourselves so reviews remain honest. If you take one thing from this page, take this: we only recommend things we have personally bought and used, and we never put affiliate links into care sheets.

Last updated: 18 May 2026

Ads on this site

Most pages on Box Turtles show display ads served by Google AdSense (publisher ID pub-4240720052276636). We do not pick the individual ads — they are chosen by Google’s auction based on the page content and, where you have consented, on your interests. We get paid when those ads are seen or clicked, in line with standard AdSense rates.

What that means in practice:

  • Editorial content on this site is never adjusted for an advertiser. We have no ad sales team.
  • We do block whole categories that we are not comfortable with — gambling, dating, and anything pet‑sales related (we do not want box turtle hatchling ads on our own site).
  • If you ever see an ad on Box Turtles that looks misleading or harmful — for example, an ad selling wild‑caught turtles — please tell us. We will block the advertiser.

If you would rather not see personalised ads, see the opt‑out instructions in our privacy policy.

Affiliate links

A handful of our review and recommendation posts contain affiliate links. When you click one of those links and then buy the product, the retailer pays us a small commission. It does not change the price you pay. The networks we currently use are:

  • Amazon Associates — most of our book reviews and a few of our equipment recommendations link to Amazon. Box Turtles is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. Commission on most categories is currently 3%.
  • We occasionally use a small independent reptile retailer we have ordered from ourselves. Where that link is affiliate, we say so in the post.

That is the whole list. We do not currently run AvantLink, ShareASale, Impact, CJ, Rakuten, or any other affiliate network, and we do not accept private affiliate deals with breeders or pet shops.

How you can tell which links are affiliate

The cleanest signal is the disclosure at the top of any review post that contains affiliate links — we put a one‑line note like “This post contains Amazon affiliate links. We earn a small commission if you buy through them; the price you pay does not change.” If that line is not at the top of the post, there are no affiliate links in the article. Care sheets, species pages, taxonomy and conservation pieces, and how‑to husbandry articles never contain affiliate links — even when we mention specific products by name.

Our rules for product recommendations

We are not interested in being a “best of” SEO farm, and our rules reflect that:

  1. We have to own it. Every product in a review post has been bought (with our own money) and used by at least one of the team for at least a season. No press samples. No spec‑sheet round‑ups.
  2. We say what we did not like. If a product was disappointing, we say so. A review without a single criticism is a sales page.
  3. No paid placements in editorial. No company has ever paid us to add their product to a care sheet, and no company ever will. If we change our minds about that, we will say so at the top of the post in question, in a font you cannot miss.
  4. We will not recommend live‑animal purchases. Box Turtles do not appear on this site as products. Adoption, rescue, and rehoming are the only routes we will write about.

Sponsored content

We do not currently publish sponsored posts. If we ever did, we would label the article clearly at the top and in the URL, and we would not let the sponsor approve the copy. Editorial control is non‑negotiable.

Press samples

If a manufacturer ever sends us a product to test — this happens roughly never — we will say so in the review, and we will only write about it after using it for at least a season. The default outcome is that we keep the sample as long as we are using it, and donate it to a local rescue when we are done.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you would like to know whether a specific link is affiliate, please write to us. Honest answers to that question are part of why this disclosure exists.

Thanks for trusting us with your reading time. The work this site exists to do — better husbandry, less wild collection, more careful keeping — is helped, not hurt, by these honest revenue sources.

— Maya, Ben, Hannah and Drew

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