Comparison sites make money from the companies they compare. That is not a scandal — it is how they exist without charging you — but it does mean the ordering of results deserves an explanation rather than a footnote.
This is ours, in full.
The default order: first-year cost
Results are sorted by first-year cost: the setup fee plus twelve months at whatever rates apply during those twelve months.
Not the monthly price, because it hides setup fees and intro offers. Not total contract cost, because ranking on it means short contracts win automatically for ending sooner — an 18-month deal at £19 “beats” a 24-month deal at £19 by 25%, which is a units error rather than a saving.
A fixed twelve-month window measures every deal against the same ruler regardless of term. A 36-month contract and a rolling monthly deal are directly comparable.
You can re-sort by total contract cost, average monthly cost, or speed. Whichever you choose, the “Lowest…” label on the winning row names the metric actually in use — a superlative that does not say what it is measuring is not information.
What we are paid, and how you can tell
Some providers pay us a commission if you click through and buy. Those rows carry an “Ad” label, individually, on the row itself.
Three rules govern that label:
1. It means we are actually paid. Not that a programme exists somewhere, not that we have applied. It flips only when a live tracking link is in place. A programme can be paused while a link still exists, so we never infer it from the link.
2. It is per row, not per page. A general disclaimer at the bottom of a page is not adequate when only some rows are monetised. You should be able to see which is which without scrolling.
3. It never affects position. The ranking is computed from price data. There is no commission field, no priority column, and nothing in the sort that could reach for one even if someone wanted it to.
As things stand, 9 of the providers we list pay us anything. The other couple of hundred do not, and are listed identically.
Why we list companies that pay us nothing
Because a comparison that only contains paying advertisers is an advertising page wearing a comparison’s clothes.
We list every UK provider we can find. Where we have no price for one, it appears as “No price on file yet” rather than disappearing — a gap in our data is not a reason to hide a company from you, and quietly dropping unprofitable rows is precisely how a whole-of-market claim becomes false.
That has an obvious commercial cost. A significant share of the deals we show earn us nothing, including some that rank above ones that would. We think a comparison you can trust is worth more than an extra click-through, and if that turns out to be wrong commercially, the answer will be to find another way to fund it rather than to quietly reorder the results.
When we hide things, we say so
Filtering necessarily hides providers. Every time we do it, the toolbar states how many and offers the way back:
- Postcode search narrows to providers selling in your postcode area, and says how many were hidden.
- The homepage shows only UK-wide providers, because with no postcode there is nothing to match a regional network against — with a count of the regional providers not shown.
- Speed, contract and connection-type filters each report how many providers they removed and why.
Those counts come from a full count of the market, never from the rows on the page. That distinction matters: an exclusion count computed from a page of results understates the truth the moment the list is longer than the page.
Providers whose coverage we do not know are always shown. Hiding them would turn a gap in our research into an invisible exclusion.
What we will not claim
We do not know which providers serve your specific address. We know what the line at your address can carry, from Ofcom’s per-address data. We know which providers sell somewhere in your postcode area. Those are different, the gap between them is real, and there is a disclaimer on every postcode result saying so. When a provider gives us a genuine availability feed, that will change — until then we will not imply certainty we do not have.
We do not guess prices. Every price carries the date it was last checked and the page it came from. After 45 days it stops being displayed as fact and the row says “price needs rechecking” instead. An automated pass once produced four plausible-looking prices for a provider whose website contains no prices at all; the verification step caught them, and that is why the rule exists.
We do not fold future price rises into headline figures. Where a contract has a stated increase, it is shown as its own field on the row. Folding a future rise into a “total cost” makes the number unverifiable — you could not check it against anything.
Corrections
If something here is wrong — a price, a coverage area, a company that has changed hands — we would rather know. Provider details change constantly: in a single review pass we found nine listed brands had closed, merged or been absorbed, several without any public announcement.
Anything we cannot verify is marked unconfirmed rather than presented as fact.
Sources
- ofcom.org.uk — Ofcom — Connected Nations coverage data
- asa.org.uk — Advertising Standards Authority — CAP Code, recognition of advertising
- gov.uk — Competition and Markets Authority — guidance for comparison tools