Over half the picks we checked sent the buyer elsewhere.

A guide names your product the best in its class. The reader clicks "buy". In this sample, more than half the time they land somewhere you earn a wholesale margin, or pay a marketplace fee, and never learn who the customer was.

This is not the guides doing anything wrong. Most say plainly that they earn a commission on links, and that is how free, tested reviews get paid for. It does mean the link tends to go to whoever has an arrangement with the publisher.

The spread is wide. Some guides link almost entirely to brands' own stores; others almost never do. That is the opportunity: where a publisher will link direct for some brands, it can be asked to for yours.

• Look. Search for "best" plus your product, open the first five guides and click every link next to your name.
• Ask. Go to the publisher, one at a time, with a proper affiliate arrangement and a reason to link direct: a reader discount, a product to re-test.
• Measure. Give each publisher its own link, so you can see what each one is worth.

I did exactly this on an online store my partners and I later sold. The affiliate programme became a third of sales.

• What was read: 39 UK guides published or updated in 2026, across 16 product groups, listed below. Only guides that could be read in full were used; several large publishers block automated reading and are not in the sample.
• Read twice: each guide was read twice, separately. A product was counted only where both reads agreed on where its links went. 354 recommendations passed; 30 were left out because the reads disagreed or a link could not be followed.
• "Own store" means the link's web address matched the brand. On two sites that hide the address behind a short link, the shop named on the button was used instead. The destinations themselves were not visited.
• Retailers' own labels were left out of the guides added in the second round (20 products): a supermarket's own vitamins on its own site say nothing about where a brand's sale goes.
• It shows where links go, not what was sold. Nothing here measures sales, lost customers or what a link is worth. For some brands a retailer link is the right answer: it depends on margin, stock and where their customers like to buy.
• It is a small sample, not a survey of the whole market, and it leans towards health, food, baby and pet products. The coffee and pet food guides are from small affiliate sites that link only to Amazon. Which? lists the products it tested; its Best Buy verdicts are for members only.
• Research was AI-assisted and checked by Robert Prime. How this site is made.

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