Comparison and Review Site Placements Bought on Page Data

Most of the comparison-site placements we are asked to price sit on pages taking fewer than two hundred organic sessions a month. The domain ranks; the page does not. We price a placement on the page itself, on its live position for the two or three queries that carry buying intent, and on what the site's editorial policy actually permits, and most of what arrives on the desk fails the first of those three. Diligence before price: URL-level traffic rather than domain authority, read in Ahrefs and Semrush and checked against the site's own click logs where they will share them. Live rank for the named queries tracked for three weeks before anything is signed, because a page that entered the top three last month may be sitting on a fluctuation. Internal link depth, which tells you whether the site itself believes in the page. And whether the page's visibility rests on content hosted under somebody else's domain: Google's site reputation abuse policy has been enforced since November 2024, and a placement on that kind of page is a wasting asset at any price. Where this work happens: Gartner Digital Markets properties for HR technology, where category position is a CPC auction fed by review volume and recency and the bid is only half the lever. Clutch and the staffing directories for agency buyers. In US legal, Avvo, Justia, FindLaw and Lawyers.com alongside the city and practice-area comparison pages that routinely outrank them on local queries. Trustpilot and Israeli comparison inventory for local services, where the rate card is a phone call. Legal advertisers get one extra step. In several US states, paying a comparison site per signed case is fee sharing with a non-lawyer under that state's version of Rule 5.4, whatever the vendor's deck says about it. We read the rule in the state, not the assurance in the deck, and the commercial model moves to flat or per-click where it has to. Terms we negotiate: Slot, position and duration in writing. The right to see copy before it publishes. A dated review with a refresh commitment, because a screenshot of a 2022 interface tells the buyer more than the paragraph beside it. rel="sponsored" on paid placement, which protects you rather than the publisher. A click-level data feed. A step-down or an exit if the page leaves the top three for the query it was bought on. And an adjacency rule: no direct competitor placed above you in the same table for the term of the deal. What is not included: No review generation, no incentivised reviews, no responses to reviews you already have, no PR. We do not write a site's editorial and hand it over to be published under their masthead. Where a site offers that arrangement, it has told you what the placement is worth. What we refuse: We do not buy the top slot on a page that presents its ranking as independent. We do not buy placements on parasite inventory, whatever it currently ranks for. And we do not place an advertiser whose product would honestly come third in the table, because the placement is read against the reviews underneath it and it loses that argument in public. Who this is not for: Advertisers who need something live this month. Advertisers who cannot accept us declining a site whose name they recognise. And advertisers with no third-party reviews at all, where a paid placement points traffic at an empty profile and the money belongs somewhere earlier in the sequence. You end with a shortlist you could defend to a sceptical board, the reasoning attached to each name including the ones we rejected, negotiated terms with the exit written in, and tracking that tells you which page earned what.