Advertising and sponsorship

The position today

Every page on this site is editorial. In practice that means:

• The pages carry no display advertising.
• Every article is written to the editorial policy, and none of them is advertorial or a paid mention.
• Outbound links are citations. There are no affiliate links and no commission on anything.
• The doctors listed here work with us directly, and that relationship is described on the conflicts of interest page. It is the more important page of the two and you should read that one.

The rules if that ever changes

Written now rather than later, because rules written after the first offer are not rules.

• Paid placement never appears inside the directory results. Anything paid for sits in a labelled block outside the result set, is never position-dependent, and never influences who is included.
• The label is never smaller or lighter than the content it labels. The industry default is a grey ten-pixel "sponsored" beside a large bold name, and inverting that default is the whole point.
• Payment can never change what a profile says, add a field, remove a field or alter the wording of one.
• Ordering parameters stay published, one click from the listing, which European ranking-transparency rules require and which is right anyway.
• Any sponsored page carries the same review and correction rules as every other page.

A legal constraint most platforms do not mention

Turkish regulation published in the Official Gazette on 12 November 2025 permits a health professional to be listed on a platform only where the listing is not paid-sponsored and is not aimed at giving that professional prominence. The same regulation makes those who share non-compliant promotion equally responsible for it.

The practical effect is that a surgeon practising in Turkiye cannot lawfully buy prominence here, whoever offers it. That is a real constraint on what this site could ever sell, and we would rather state it than quietly design around it.