Transparency
Where the money comes from, what we turn down, and who we will not take a call from.
How we earn money
Two income streams keep this site running. Neither one is a financial product, and that took some saying no.
- Advertising (display/AdSense). Visually separated from editorial content and labelled.
- Partner links (no financial products), where present: charging cards, chargers, accessories, car rental, and a link to the manufacturer's own configurator on currently-orderable models. Where such a link appears, a purchase through it may earn a fee; your price does not change. We mark such links as commercial in the page code, so search engines can confirm we are not hiding the relationship.
Sponsored guides are possible but always disclosed up front and clearly labelled. A paid placement never appears as an editorial judgement. See the advertising page for ad options.
What we deliberately do not do
Most of these doors lead to easy money, and we keep them shut on purpose.
- No listings aggregation. We show no individual offers and sell no cars.
- No forms that hand your details to a leasing, insurance or financing provider.
- No lease affiliate (Justlease, Athlon, ALD): credit intermediation under the Dutch financial supervision act (Wft).
- No insurance affiliate (Independer, Promovendum): a financial product under the Dutch Wft.
- No referral deals with car-buying platforms such as Carwow or Heycar that earn a fee when you contact a dealer.
- No marketplace affiliate (AutoScout24, mobile.de, LaCentrale).
- No income input in tools and no "best choice for you" output.
- No explicit cost comparison framing one model as cheaper or better.
These limits are built into the product, not just written into this page. That way no commercial partner ever stands to gain from a slanted figure.
Ratings stay independent of advertisers
Category ratings and specs follow the public methodology and its stated sources only. Advertisers and affiliate partners get no preview, no influence over a score and no way to have a figure adjusted. With insufficient data the score stays empty, even where that is commercially inconvenient. Browse every model with its category ratings in the catalogue.
Reviews: labelling (EU Omnibus)
Under the Omnibus Directive it must be clear whether a review comes from real users and whether it is verified.
- Owner reviews are submitted anonymously and moderated before publication. We do not pay for them. We edit only spelling and readability, never the sentiment or figure. We do not verify ownership, so they are not presented as verified purchases.
- Summaries of external sources are labelled as such, summarised transformatively and linked to the source. They are not first-party reviews and are not presented as such.
Reviews that do not pass moderation are not rewritten; they are simply not published. We pay nobody for writing a review.
Grounds for refusal: not verifiable or clearly not from an owner or user; abusive, unlawful or traceable to a person; advertising or spam.
Submitting is done through the review form. The form is anonymous and accepts an optional email for a possible verification question only.
How reviews weigh as rating input: see the methodology.
Independence
autoseeker is written by one person, for every market, under one name. There is no per-brand paid content and no ghostwriter, so there is nobody to lean on a score. If you find a figure you can pick apart, that is what the colophon and contact page is for.