Advertising pays for this site. Every paid placement is labelled as paid, sits apart from editorial content, and carries a link that search engines can tell is sponsored. Paying never changes where a business appears in an editorial list.
What businesses can buy
- Paid listing tiers, which add photos, a fuller description, links, an owner dashboard and the ability to post an offer.
- Featured placement in a labelled slot on category and neighborhood pages.
- Category and newsletter sponsorship.
- Display advertising in defined slots.
- Photography and content production, which is a service, not coverage.
What no amount of money buys
- A position in an editorial list. Our ranking methodology explains how those are decided, and payment is not part of it.
- The word “best”. A business is not described as the best at anything because it paid.
- Search rankings, backlink value, domain authority or PageRank. We do not sell these, and we will not claim a listing delivers them.
- Citations in AI assistants. Nobody can guarantee that a business will be mentioned by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot. Any company selling you that guarantee is selling something they cannot deliver.
- Removal of a competitor, or suppression of accurate information about the advertiser.
- Editorial approval of a correction. If a fact is wrong we fix it, advertiser or not.
How paid content is labelled
Paid placements carry a visible label, in plain words, adjacent to the content itself and not buried at the foot of the page. “Featured”, “Sponsor”, “Paid placement” and “Sponsored” all mean money changed hands. A sponsored guide or profile says so at the top, before you read it.
We do not run advertising that imitates editorial design, and we do not write sponsored content in a way that is meant to be mistaken for our own recommendation.
Links
Any outbound link that exists because someone paid for it carries rel="sponsored". Links submitted by users that we have not yet reviewed carry rel="ugc nofollow". This is stored against the business record itself rather than decided by a page template, so a redesign cannot silently turn paid links into ordinary editorial ones.
Where we earn a commission on a booking, ticket or reservation link, the page says so.
Advertising we will not accept
- Anything misleading about price, availability or what a business actually provides.
- Businesses we have reason to believe are not operating.
- Advertising aimed at children.
- Anything that would require us to remove or soften accurate information.
Reporting
Advertisers get impression and click numbers taken from what we actually measured. We do not estimate, model or round up audience figures, and we would rather quote a small real number than a large invented one. Where we do not yet have enough traffic to be worth someone’s money, we will say so instead of selling them a placement.
Our own businesses
Common ownership · Headshots LA is owned by the publisher of this guide. It is listed under the same rules as any other business, is excluded from “best of” lists in its own category, and this relationship is disclosed wherever it appears.
Related: editorial standards · ranking methodology · advertise with us