How ClickTug verifies a listing

What we read

Every listing starts from the vendor's own pages: the pricing page, the privacy policy, the terms, the acceptable use policy and any published position on minors. Each fact on the listing records which of those it came from, and the listing carries the date the pages were read.

Where a price cannot be read without an age gate or without running the vendor's JavaScript, the listing says the price is gated rather than absent, and a rendering pass is run before that conclusion is reached. A tool of ours failing to read a page is never recorded as a vendor withholding something.

What happens when a vendor publishes nothing

It is written down as an absence rather than filled in. A listing can say "not documented" about retention, training, a jurisdiction or a position on minors, and every one of those fields has a rule in our own schema that refuses a listing which leaves the question silent. The absence is the finding.

That is a change of standard, made on 10 September 2026. A published privacy policy, acceptable use policy and likeness clause used to be preconditions for being listed at all. They graded documentation rather than conduct, and a directory that refuses to list an undocumented vendor does not protect a reader from that vendor, it hides the fact that they are undocumented. Conduct still refuses, absolutely: the minor-safety bar below, clothing removal from photographs, and the capabilities named in our content policy.

How pages are ordered

Every hub on this site says "Ordered by editorial review", and that sentence deserves more than a link. Here is exactly what produces the order you see.

Each listing file carries one whole number called order. The hub sorts on that number and breaks ties alphabetically by product name. Nothing else touches the sequence. The number is assigned by hand when the listing is written and edited by hand afterwards, and no code anywhere on this site computes it, weights it, or derives it from a field. Any listing's position is checkable in our own repository, because the number lives in the same file as the facts.

It is a position, not a rating. There is no ClickTug score, and that statement has to survive contact with this page or it is worth nothing. So: theorder value is not a quality figure, is not published as one, is not aggregated, is not emitted in our structured data, and is not the sum of anything. A listing three places above another is not three units better than it. If we ever build a scored ranking, the rubric will be published and versioned before the first number appears, which is the same commitment made on the about page.

Money is not an input. A listing whose outbound link carries a partner parameter is ordered exactly as it would be without one, and a submission that was paid for is ordered exactly as one that was not. The first half of that is enforced rather than promised: the affiliate field is unreadable from every file that touches the sort, which a test in our repository asserts on every build. The second half is a statement about how the order is assigned by hand, and the place to check it is the order number sitting in the same file as the facts.

What screening finds

Candidates go through an automated screen before anyone spends time on them: does the vendor publish a price, terms, a privacy policy and a position on minors, each at an address a reader can open. The screen is reproducible from our own repository and its raw output is kept. It decides what is worth reading, never what gets listed.

On 8 Aug 2026 we ran it over 405 candidate services.267 returned anything readable to an automated request. Of those:

57 vendors published a price, terms and a privacy policy. 47 of them, 82 percent, failed on nothing except minors.

This market is not undocumented. Around half of it publishes terms and a privacy policy, which is what any small software company does. It has collectively decided to say nothing about minors, and until 9 August 2026 we required it.

Why we stopped requiring a minor safety policy

The number above was collected to justify the rule and ended up retiring it. A requirement that removes four out of five otherwise-complete vendors is either finding something real or measuring the wrong thing, and three findings from our own work say it was the second.

A clothing-removal service in that 31 publishes a minor safety policy, and we will not list it at any standard. A companion app we excluded on independent testing published one as well, along with a price, terms and a privacy policy: complete paperwork, excluded on the record. And two of the better-run services we assessed publish nothing on the subject anywhere, with no adverse finding against either.

A policy page is a claim. The record is evidence. So the requirement became a research step. Before anything is listed we search for reporting, incident-database entries and independent testing naming the vendor, and evidence that a product has generated sexual content involving minors, or people presented as minors, excludes it whatever its terms say. That check has excluded vendors whose documents were complete, which the old rule could not do and the new one has already done.

What a vendor publishes about minors did not stop mattering. It moved: every listing carries a row reading either Published, linked, or Not published with the date we looked and where. A reader now sees the silence instead of us acting on it out of sight. We still record who publishes one on our assessed but not listed page, and the five entries the change made obsolete were withdrawn there rather than left standing.

Freshness

Every listing carries the date its facts were read, above the fold rather than in a footer, and that date drives the lastmod entry in our sitemap. Pricing and policies in this category change within weeks, so the date is part of the fact: an undated price here is not a price, it is a memory.

Listings are rechecked in passes rather than continuously, and the most recent pass is listed on the home page. A listing we have not rechecked says so by carrying an older date, which is a more useful signal than a freshness badge that always reads green.

How to audit us

Every fact on a listing names the vendor page it came from and links to it. The fastest audit is to open one of those links and read the same sentence we read. Where a listing says something is not documented, the check is the same in reverse: open the policy and see that it is absent.

If you operate a listed tool, our outbound link goes to your own URL carrying aref=clicktug parameter, with no redirect in between and no referrer suppression, so our referrals appear in your own analytics under our name.

Something wrong? Write to [email protected] or report the listing. Corrections are free, from anyone, and we have never asked a vendor to buy anything to have a factual error fixed.

Privacy

This site measures nothing. It sets no cookie, stores nothing on your device, runs no analytics script and loads nothing from another origin. An outbound-click measurement ran here from 8 August to 11 September 2026 and never published a figure; it was removed with its endpoint, its database table and its signing key. The privacy policy sets out what that leaves, which is very little.

Changes to these rules

A change of standard is dated here rather than applied quietly, because a methodology page that changes without saying so is worth less than no methodology page.

• 11 Sept 2026Outbound click measurement removed entirely. This page is now about verification and ordering, which is what the site actually does.
• 10 Sept 2026A published privacy policy, acceptable use policy and likeness clause stopped being preconditions for listing. Refuse on conduct, disclose on documentation.
• 9 Aug 2026A published minor-safety policy stopped being a precondition, for the reasons set out above. What a vendor publishes became a recorded fact instead.