Last updated: 20 August 2026. Required reading under the FTC’s Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) — and, frankly, the honest thing to publish.
The short version
How we get paid
Compare Small Business Insurance is free to use and carries advertising relationships. We are paid one way and one way only: when you click a link to an insurance partner — Hiscox is our current partner — and then receive a quote, that partner pays us a flat fee. That is it. We run no quote form and sell no leads, because we collect nothing to sell. You never pay more because you came through us. The price a carrier quotes you is the carrier’s own price; our commission comes out of their marketing budget, not your premium.
Which links are paid
Every paid link on this Site carries the HTML attribute
rel="sponsored nofollow", and paid buttons say who the partner is
(“Get a Free Quote with Hiscox”) with the note “sponsored
partner” next to them. Every guide that contains one opens with an advertising
disclosure above the article text. Assume that any outbound link to an insurer, a
marketplace or a quoting tool is paid. Links to government resources, state insurance
departments, standards bodies, and our own pages are not.
What our partners pay us for
| Action you take | Are we paid? | Does it cost you anything? |
|---|---|---|
| Reading a guide | No | No |
| Using the cost calculator | No | No |
| Clicking through to a partner | No — a click on its own earns us nothing | No |
| Receiving a quote from a partner | Yes — a flat fee, and it is the only thing our current program pays for | No |
| Buying a policy from a partner | Sometimes — our current program pays nothing extra when you buy | No. You pay the carrier’s own price |
We are paid a flat fee or a percentage set by the partner or their affiliate network. We are never paid more for steering you to a more expensive policy, a higher limit, or an add-on you do not need, and we do not take payment to write a favourable review.
How compensation affects what you see — and what it does not
Being paid by the companies we send you to is a genuine conflict of interest. Pretending otherwise would be worse than disclosing it, so here are the rules we hold ourselves to:
- Compensation influences placement. Which partner we feature, and how prominently, is affected by whether they have an affiliate program we can join and what it pays. If a carrier has no program, we can still write about them, but we cannot send you to them with a tracked link.
- Compensation does not influence our figures. The averages, ranges and comparisons we publish are produced under the method in our editorial policy and are not adjusted to flatter a partner. If our own benchmark says a partner’s advertised price is above average for your trade, we print that.
- No partner previews our content. Carriers and networks do not see, approve or edit a page before it publishes. We accept no sponsored posts and no paid guest articles.
- We disclose before the click, not after. Disclosure appears above the article body and beside the buttons, not buried in a footer.
- We do not cover every insurer. This Site is not a complete survey of the market. There are good carriers we do not list, and you should get more than one quote before you buy.
Who we currently have a paid relationship with
| Partner | Relationship | What they do |
|---|---|---|
| Hiscox | Affiliate partner via CJ Affiliate — paid a flat fee per referred quote | A-rated (AM Best) small business insurer; quotes general liability, professional liability and BOP online |
That is the complete list — one paid relationship. We update this table when a relationship starts or ends, and we are actively adding carriers; each one will be named here before we start linking to it.
What we are not
We are not an insurance company, agency, broker or licensed producer. We do not sell insurance, bind coverage, set prices, decide who is eligible, or handle claims. We are not owned by, funded by, or operated on behalf of any insurer. The carriers we name are not responsible for our content, and our opinions are ours alone. Insurer names and logos are used for identification and belong to their owners.
Advertising and analytics
We do not run display ads or behavioural retargeting. We use Google Analytics 4 and Microsoft Clarity to understand which guides get read and where visitors get stuck, and affiliate networks set a cookie when you click a partner link so the partner can credit the referral to us. What each one collects, and how to opt out, is set out in the privacy policy.
Questions or a complaint about this disclosure
If you think a link on this Site is inadequately disclosed, tell us and we will fix it — contact us.
Related: how we research and fact-check our figures · about us · privacy policy · terms of use.