What is paid for, and what is not

The relationship

Pickle Recipe participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate this site earns from qualifying purchases. Buying through a link here costs you nothing extra.

Where paid links appear

Two pages, and only two: equipment and the larder. Between them they hold 34 product slots, of which 30 currently resolve to a listing. Every individual block carries a stamp saying it is an affiliate link and a line at its foot repeating it, and every outbound link is marked rel="nofollow sponsored noopener".

Where they never appear

There is no affiliate link on any page carrying a controlling number: no tradition page, no method page, no calculator, no regulation text, and above all not on the safety page. This is enforced structurally - the component that renders an offer is imported by exactly two files - and not by intention alone.

The reason is straightforward. A product block beside a salt percentage reads as this site endorsing a procedure. It does not endorse procedures. It publishes what a named source states and says who stated it, and a page that did both at once would be selling the authority of the first with the second.

How a product gets chosen

By keyword search against Amazon's catalogue at build time, filtered by rules in a script, not by anyone who has used the thing. The rules reject books about the product, seasoning mixes for making it, kits, snacks flavoured to taste like it, accessories, replacement parts, and anything whose title does not contain the name of what the slot asked for. Where nothing survives the rules, the block becomes a tagged search and says on its face that it is a search rather than a recommendation. That happens on four of the 34 slots at present, and leaving it visible is deliberate: a recommendation that is actually a guess is worth less than no recommendation.

Nothing on this site has been paid for by a manufacturer, and no brand has any influence over what is listed. There are no sponsored posts, no gifted products and no paid placements of any kind.

Prices and dates

Prices are read from the Amazon Creators API when the site is built and are not live. Every price is printed with the date it was read, most recently 2026-09-06. Where the API returns a used offer as well as a new one, both are shown, because showing only the flattering one is what that requirement exists to prevent. Prices on Amazon change; the figure here is a snapshot and the date beside it says so.

The tag

Every paid link on this site carries the Amazon Associates tag picklerecipe-20, which is this site's own. Nothing is attributed to a sibling property, and the tag is set in one file so that the pages and the build script cannot disagree about it.

Everything else

No advertising network. No sponsored content. No paid links in the body of any article. No newsletter, no accounts, no payments taken. The site sets no cookies of its own and runs one analytics script, with its advertising signals switched off so nothing is shared for cross-context behavioural advertising, which is set out in full on privacy.

The one commercial rule worth stating plainly: if the choice is ever between a page that earns and a page that is accurate, the accurate one wins. That is why four product slots on this site show a search box instead of a product.