CityDogsLife pays for itself with affiliate links and display ads. There is no paywall, no membership, nothing to subscribe to. When you follow a link from here to a retailer and buy something, the retailer sends us a cut of that sale. You pay the same price you would have paid going there directly — the commission comes out of their margin, not your wallet.
The programs we are actually in
Three of them, and every one is visible in the page source if you want to check.
Amazon Associates covers most of it. Product links point at amazon.com and carry our store tag, citydogslif09-20. The wording Amazon requires: CityDogsLife is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
CJ Affiliate handles the pet pharmacies — CanadaPetCare, PetCareSupplies, BudgetPetCare and Raw Paws. Those show up in the flea, tick, heartworm and joint-care articles, where the price gap against a clinic refill is the whole point. Those links travel through anrdoezrs.net before they land on the retailer.
Rakuten Advertising accounts for exactly one brand link, Hill’s Pet, routed through click.linksynergy.com.
Chewy is the odd one out. We send readers there constantly in the gear articles because that is where half of this stuff actually lives, and those links earn us nothing at all — they are plain search URLs with no tracking attached. Same for the vet schools, the AKC and the other sources we cite: no money moves.
How to spot an affiliate link
Every one of them is marked rel="sponsored nofollow" in the HTML and opens in a new tab. The recommendation boxes inside articles carry their own one-line disclosure, so you are told before the click rather than after it. If you would rather not send the referral, type the product name into the retailer’s own search box and we get nothing. That is a perfectly fine way to use this site.
What the money does not buy
No brand pays us for a placement, a position in a list or a kind adjective. The three programs above are open sign-ups: joining one puts us in a payout system, not in a conversation with a retailer. Nobody reviews a draft before it goes live, and nobody gets to reorder a list of picks.
As of August 2026 we have never published a paid sponsored post and never accepted a free product in exchange for coverage. If that ever changes, it will be stated in the first paragraph of the article concerned, not buried down here.
One more thing worth saying plainly, because it is where affiliate sites usually go wrong: nothing on this site is veterinary advice, and a commission has never made a product safer. When a claim needs a professional behind it, we quote one and link to the source so you can read it yourself. It sits next to how we work.
Ads
The banner and in-article slots are served by Google AdSense. Google and its partners use cookies to choose what to show you, which is why you get a consent prompt before anything loads if you are in the EU or the UK. Refusing is a real option: the ads keep working, they just stop being personalised. The privacy policy covers what is stored and for how long.
Questions
If something here is unclear, or you think a link is mislabelled, tell us through the contact page and we will fix it.
Last updated: 10 August 2026.