🤝 Disclosure

Affiliate disclosure

Last updated: 28 August 2026

The AI Ronin Lab uses some affiliate links. If you click one and go on to subscribe, the lab may earn a commission — at no extra cost to you. The price you pay is exactly the same as going to the vendor directly.

What this means in practice

Some links to AI tools are affiliate links. Most are not.
Affiliate links carry the standard rel="sponsored" attribute, so browsers and search engines can identify them.
Whenever a page shows a recommendation that uses one, a short disclosure appears on that page, right next to the results.
This is how the site is funded — instead of adverts, sponsored placements, paywalls, or selling visitor data.

Which links are affiliate links

Currently two:

ElevenLabs — active since 28 August 2026
Make — active since 28 August 2026

Every other tool in the Finder links straight to that company's normal website, with no tracking parameters and no commission attached.

More may be added as applications are approved. This page is updated when they are.

Affiliate relationships do not affect rankings

This is the part that actually matters, so it is worth being precise rather than reassuring.

The AI Tool Finder ranks tools using seven answers you give and a set of capability scores stored in a local database. Those scores describe what a tool can do — how well it handles a task, a specific outcome, a skill level, a budget tier, an audience. They are researched from the vendors' own current documentation.

The scoring engine has no access to commercial data. Whether a tool runs an affiliate programme, what it pays, and whether we have been approved for it are not inputs to the ranking. They are not stored alongside the capability scores at all. A tool cannot rank higher by paying more, because there is no field for it to pay into.

Practically, that has a consequence worth stating out loud: the Finder regularly recommends tools that earn nothing. Several of the most-recommended tools in the database — including the ones that win the research, coding and business categories outright — are made by companies with no publisher affiliate programme at all. Those recommendations are not going to change.

Not every recommended tool has an affiliate relationship

Roughly half the tools in the database have a public affiliate programme at all. The rest do not, or run partner programmes that are not open to a site like this one — and many of the tools recommended most often fall into that second group.

Of the tools that do have a programme, only the ones we have actually applied to and been approved for are ever activated. Right now that is two tools out of forty.

So a link earning a commission is very much the exception, and the presence or absence of one tells you nothing about how highly a tool is ranked.

Only approved links are activated

An affiliate link is only ever used where The AI Ronin Lab has applied to that vendor's programme and been accepted, and only using the exact link that vendor issued. No link is fabricated, guessed at, or borrowed from a network we are not a member of.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think a recommendation looks commercially motivated, please say so — contact@theaironin.com. The reasoning behind any individual recommendation is also visible in the Finder itself, under "Why this match".