At Cards and Points, we strive to publish the best, most informative content about credit cards, rewards, travel rewards, miles, and points. Our guiding principles inform the choices we make in our business and our editorial decisions.
- We create for humans.
- What we publish is original, accurate, complete, and insightful.
- We deal fairly with our employees, writers, and business partners.
Here’s a bit more on the editorial choices we make and how we produce content.
Editorial choices we make
We make content for humans. We believe that if it is better for the reader, it’s better for us. You’re coming to our site because you trust us and everything stems from that. Here are some of our editorial policies to help you better understand how we think about the content we create.
- We create for humans. This largely informs how we present information in the articles we publish. We strive to present information in a format that is easy to read and easy to reference. A long-winded, keyword-stuffed explanation might be a better SEO tactic, but we like tables and lists better.
- Our views are our own. No advertiser or sponsor can pay us to change our view. If we think that a product is bad or that another product is better, we’re happy to call that out.
- We promote the best product, offer, or service we know about. Putting our readers first means making the decision to promote the best products or offers that we know about—not just the ones we get paid for. You’ll frequently find us covering in-branch offers or direct-bank offers that we don’t get paid for.
- We source from primary sources. When writing about personal finance, accuracy is paramount. That’s why we source information from primary sources and our own experience using the products we write about. We also use data-feeds from our affiliate partners to keep things like rates/fees, card offers, and other card details up-to-date.
- We link to other sites. If we learn about something from another site, we’ll link to it. Some of the best content in the credit card and rewards space is written by independent creators, many of whom are friends. We’ll also link to another site if they share an experience with a product that we think could be informative to our readers.
- The publication date or update date of our article is accurate. If we make a major update to an article, we’ll republish it. If we’re just updating something minor, we’ll update the article. We don’t automatically republish articles every month just to make them look “fresh.”
How we make money
At Cards and Points, we earn money primarily from affiliate links. When you get a new credit card through a link on our site, we may get paid and you’re supporting the writers and other people who make this site possible.
Many sites will say that this doesn’t impact what they publish, but here’s how we ensure that advertising doesn’t impact what we write:
- We form our views before considering monetization. For example, when writing about the best cards to use at a particular store, we’ll choose which cards to include and write the article before considering which cards can be monetized. This ensures that our opinion isn’t impacted by which banks are paying us.
- We decouple our content from our advertisers. We structure our content in such a way that we can easily remove affiliate links if an advertising partner asks for editorial control or changes its offer such that another offer is better.
- Writers are paid by our company, not advertisers. Our advertisers and affiliate partners pay our company, and the people who create content are paid by us. People creating content for us are not allowed to accept direct compensation from advertisers.
- We show the best offers. Sometimes the best offer isn’t available from one of our advertising partners. We’ll always show you the best offer, even if we don’t get paid for it.
Our stance on AI-generated content.
We don’t use generative AI to produce content for our site. This is a business decision and a choice that we’ve made deliberately. Here’s why we don’t use AI to create content:
- We need content to be accurate. When writing about personal finance topics like credit cards and travel rewards, accuracy is paramount. And anything that we would generate would need to be thoroughly fact-checked. We’ve found that expert writers using primary sources can produce more accurate content and in less time.
- Our readers value authenticity. Part of what brings readers to our site is that we have actual people with actual experience writing about these products. If they wanted the first answer that an AI engine would spit out, they could just ask Alexa/Siri/Google. AI will never replicate this authenticity, and as long as people value that, it makes sense for us to produce authentic content.
- AI has access to less information than we do. We’re able to break news and report on things like changes to products and programs early because of our relationships. AI can’t generate information that’s not in its model, and it isn’t listening in on our phone calls.
- AI is a plagiarism engine. Many AI engines ingest content that they don’t have a license to use and create derivative works that get published without crediting or paying the original writer. Some might argue that it’s legal (we disagree) but it’s definitely stealing. We do not authorize any AI engine to scrape our site.
Bottom line: Content for humans
At Cards and Points, we’re creating for humans. This principle guides everything we do. Our editorial policies ensure that what we produce is authentic, accurate, fair, and puts you, the reader, first.
