Haulwide studyRead Sep 25, 2026, re-checked Sep 26, 2026
How “Best Car Shipping Company” Lists Are Funded
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Key findings
4 of 4
Lists funded by the companies on them
By their own disclosure
4 of 4
That disclose it on the page
Every one of them
2 of 4
Say payment doesn't affect the verdict
Quoted in full below
0 of 4
Outbound links passing search credit
All are nofollow
What we found, and what we did not
All four lists are funded by the car shipping companies they rank, and all of them say so somewhere on the page. What we did not find, and are not claiming, is that anyone’s ranking was bought: two of the four state plainly that payment does not affect their analysis, and those statements are quoted in full below. We measured how these pages are funded, not who influenced them.
Our own interest in this, stated first
Haulwide publishes its own ranking of car shipping companies and competes with every page named here for the same searches. We benefit if you trust them less. That is a real conflict of interest, and it is the reason this page is built entirely from things you can check yourself in a browser rather than from figures you would have to take our word for. Where a publisher says something in its own defense, we quote it rather than summarize it.
For the record: no company can pay to appear in the Haulwide directory, to rank higher in it, or to be left out of it. Our method is published.
Every one of them tells you — where most people do not look
This is the part that surprised us. There is no scandal here: each of the four pages carries a disclosure, in plain English, saying that money changes hands. They are following the rules the Federal Trade Commission sets for exactly this.
The catch is placement and wording. The disclosure is usually a small grey line labelled “Advertiser Disclosure” or “Editor’s note”, sitting above a large, colorful table of rankings. It is present, and it is skippable, and almost everybody skips it.
Car Talk
Labelled “Editor's note and disclaimer”
“Car Talk is supported by our fans, readers and listeners. When you click on some of the links on our website, we may receive referral compensation.”
Move.org
Labelled “Sponsored placements”
“Some of the placements you see on Move.org — such as “Preferred Partner” and “Featured Partner” — are sponsored.”
“Companies cannot pay to be reviewed or to receive a positive rating. Paid placements only feature movers and services our editorial team has already evaluated and approved.”
FreightWaves Checkpoint
Labelled “Advertiser Disclosure”
“Advertiser Disclosure”
Retirement Living
Labelled “Advertising Disclosure”
“We may earn money from our partners when you click a link, complete a form or call a phone number.”
“Retirement Living independently researches companies, and the compensation we receive does not affect the analysis of our staff.”
How the money is actually wired
The disclosure tells you money changes hands. The code tells you how. All four pages route their buttons in a way that lets somebody count the click, and two of the four do not send you to the company first at all.
The table below sets out what each page’s outbound links carry. What each arrangement shows:
Car Talk. The clearest example of payment per click rather than per booking: five outbound links carry utm_medium=cpc. The sub_id parameter identifies which block on the page produced the click, so performance is measured placement by placement.
Move.org. The most transparent of the four at the code level: the paid links carry rel="sponsored", which is the attribute Google asks publishers to use for exactly this. A reader who knows to look can tell a paid link from an editorial one without reading any disclosure text.
FreightWaves Checkpoint. The outbound links do not go to the companies at all. Twenty-one of them point at dicedigital.co/jump/…, a third party that appears to sell the placements. Those URLs return 403 to anything that is not a browser.
Retirement Living. Clicks pass through a redirect on the publisher's own subdomain, which stamps each one with a unique RLID before handing off to the company with utm_medium=cpc attached. A site that only recommends companies has no need to count clicks this precisely.
Paid per click is not the same as paid per booking
Two of the pages carry utm_medium=cpc on their outbound links. cpc is cost per click: the publisher is paid when you click, whether or not you ever ship a car, and whether or not the company turns out to suit you.
That is worth knowing because it changes what the page is optimised for. A page paid per booking has some interest in matching you well. A page paid per click is paid the same either way. Neither arrangement means the advice is bad — but a reader deciding how much weight to give a recommendation is entitled to know which one they are reading.
None of these links helps a company rank
Every outbound link we looked at carries rel="nofollow", and several add sponsored. Both attributes ask search engines not to pass ranking credit through the link.
So a company appearing on these lists is buying traffic and customers, not search authority. This also settles a question in the other direction: if you run a site in this category, getting listed on these pages will do nothing at all for your own search ranking.
How to check any list yourself, in about a minute
None of this requires taking our word for it, and none of it is specific to car shipping. The same five checks work on any “best of” page for insurance, moving companies, credit cards or anything else.
Look for the word near the top
Scan the page for “Advertiser Disclosure”, “Advertising Disclosure”, “Sponsored”, “Partner” or a small “Ad” label. It is often grey, small, and directly above or below the list.
This is the publisher telling you it is paid. All four pages in this study carry one. Finding it is not a reason to distrust the page — not finding one on a page full of outbound links is the thing worth noticing.
Hover over the button before you click it
Most browsers show the destination in the bottom-left corner. If it does not go to the company's own domain, it is being counted on the way through.
A link through a redirect domain is a tracked link. That is normal and not in itself a problem, but it tells you the click is worth money to someone.
Check the link attribute
Right-click the button, choose Inspect or View Source, and look at the rel attribute on the link. rel="sponsored" means paid. rel="nofollow" means the publisher is telling search engines not to pass credit through it.
rel="sponsored" is the attribute Google asks publishers to use on paid links. It is the most reliable signal on the page because it is written for machines, not for readers.
Read the tracking on the URL
Look at what follows the ? in the destination. utm_medium=cpc means cost per click. A sub_id or similar identifies which slot on the page you clicked.
cpc tells you the publisher is paid whether or not you ever ship a car. That is worth knowing when a page tells you which company is best for your situation.
Look for the method, not the verdict
Find out what the ranking was actually based on, and whether the page says so. Review counts? Prices collected? Licensing records? Somebody's judgement?
A list that explains how it was ordered can be argued with. A list that just asserts an order cannot, and that is true whether or not any money changed hands.
Method, and its limits
Each page was requested as a normal browser would request it, and the returned HTML was read directly. We recorded the rel attributes on links pointing to car shipping companies, any tracking parameters on those links, the destination host, and the page’s own disclosure wording. Every page was read on Sep 25, 2026 and read again on Sep 26, 2026; only observations that matched on both days are published here.
What this cannot show. We can see that a page is funded by the companies on it. We cannot see what any publisher is paid, which companies pay and which do not, or whether payment influenced the order — and nothing here should be read as evidence that it did.
Who is missing, and why. We looked at a fifth large publisher whose page ranks for the same searches, but on re-check it returned 772 bytes to an automated request rather than the page. Because the second reading could not confirm the first, it is excluded entirely.
These pages change. A publisher may have changed its markup, its disclosure or its partners since the dates above. The checks in the previous section will always give you the current answer, which is why they matter more than our table does.
Questions about this study
Does this mean the rankings were paid for?
No, and we make no such claim. What we observed is that these lists are funded by the companies on them, which every one of them discloses. Two state outright that payment does not affect their analysis, and we quote them saying so. Funding and influence are different things, and we only measured the first.
Is it wrong for a review site to take money?
No. Advertising is how most publishing is paid for, and disclosed advertising is legal and normal. The point of this page is not that the money exists but that most readers never see the disclosure, and a list funded per click is answering a slightly different question from the one the reader is asking.
Isn't Haulwide a competitor to these pages?
Yes. We publish our own company rankings and we compete with these pages for the same searches, so we benefit if you trust them less. That is a real conflict of interest and it is why every observation here is one you can verify yourself rather than something you have to take from us.
Is Haulwide paid by the companies it lists?
No. No company can pay to appear in our directory, to be ranked higher in it, or to be removed from it. Our ordering comes from hand-checked review data against a published methodology.
How we rank companiesDo these pages help a company's search ranking?
No. Every outbound link we observed carries rel="nofollow", which asks search engines not to pass ranking credit. What a company gets from these placements is traffic and customers, not search authority.
Can I cite this research?
Yes. Please credit Haulwide, link to this page so readers can see the observation dates, and note that the observations are a snapshot: these pages change, and a publisher may have changed its markup since.
What the links actually carry
Read from each page’s own HTML on Sep 25, 2026 and again on Sep 26, 2026. Only observations that matched on both days appear here.
| Publisher | Discloses payment? | Link attribute | Where the click goes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Car Talkcartalk.com | Yes“Editor's note and disclaimer” | rel="nofollow noopener"rel="nofollow" | Direct, tracked |
| Move.orgmove.org | Yes“Sponsored placements” | rel="sponsored nofollow" | Direct, tracked |
| FreightWaves Checkpointfreightwaves.com | Yes“Advertiser Disclosure” | rel="noopener nofollow sponsored"rel="nofollow noopener sponsored" | Third partydicedigital.co |
| Retirement Livingretirementliving.com | Yes“Advertising Disclosure” | rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" | Publisher's own redirectgo.retirementliving.com |
See how we rank companies
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