Qualified-click methodology

The short version

You are billed for one qualified click per person, per product, per 24-hour period — and nothing else. A qualified click is a click on your link from a real, engaged human browser. Bots, automation, duplicates, and anything ambiguous are not billed. When we're unsure, you keep the money. We deliberately bill less and credit more.

Why we don't bill redirects

Many marketplaces count a click the instant a server fires an outbound redirect. We measured our own server-side redirect count at roughly 48 times the real human clicks behind it. That gap is automated traffic — scrapers, link-checkers, preview bots. Billing on that number would be billing you for bots.

So we ignore the server redirect count entirely for billing. We bill a separate, client-verified click signal that only a real browser running our page code can produce, and then we filter it further.

The qualified-click rules

Every click is evaluated against these gates, in order:

1. Hard fraud — rejected, never billed

• No browser fingerprint. If the click has no real browser signature, it's a synthetic client. Not billed.
• Headless or automation. Headless Chrome, Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium and similar are rejected.
• Known bot or library. Crawlers, HTTP libraries (curl, requests, axios, Go/Java clients), and AI crawlers are rejected.

2. Ambiguous — credited, never billed

• Below the engagement floor. A click from a session with no meaningful page engagement (no dwell time and a single pageview) is treated as a drive-by and not billed.
• Unidentifiable visitor. If we can't identify the person well enough to deduplicate them, we can't safely bill — so we don't.
• Unnatural click velocity. A visitor firing outbound clicks unnaturally fast is flagged and credited.

3. Deduplication

• One billable click per person, per product, per 24 hours. If the same visitor clicks your link three times today, you pay for one. The window resets at UTC midnight.

4. Inventory & balance

• Funded slot required. A click is only billable if you have an active Promoted slot and a funded wallet on that surface.
• Never overdraws. If your balance can't cover a full click at your bid, the click is free and your slots auto-pause. We never produce a negative balance or an invoice.
• Founding credit first. While you have founding free-click credit, it is spent before any of your cash deposit.

Pricing

• Floor: $2.00 per qualified click. Your bid sets your rank among Promoted slots; it can be higher but never lower than the floor.
• Founding lock: founding advertisers keep their floor for 12 months.
• Minimum deposit: $500, prepaid. No contract, no auto-charge unless you opt in.

Auditability & disputes

Every click we evaluate is recorded with the decision and the reasons for it — billed, credited, or rejected — so a charge can always be explained. Your dashboard shows qualified clicks, credited clicks, rejected clicks, and the source pages that drove them.

We also run a post-hoc reconciliation pass: if later analysis shows a billed click was part of a coordinated pattern we missed in the moment, we credit it back. If you believe a charge is wrong, contact us and we will review the recorded decision with you. Our default in any genuinely ambiguous case is to credit.

What this protects

Two things. First, you — you pay for buyers, not bots, and your exposure is capped at your prepaid balance. Second, the data — because Promoted placements are clearly labeled and entirely separate from our editorial rankings, the pricing information stays trustworthy for the buyers and AI assistants that rely on it. That trust is what makes a click here worth buying.

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