$3 at Nord VPN
22% of the product pages an agent reads carry declared advertising.
We asked Google 50 questions people put to an agent before buying something, read the top ten results the way an agent does, and counted what each publisher itself marked as commercial: sponsored links, affiliate links, promo codes, paid-placement notices. Ten control questions with no product in them turned up none. Advertising that carries no marker is not counted, so every number here is a floor.
593 pages
357 returned text
64 of 296 product pages marked
0 of 61 control pages
Pages with declared advertising, by what was asked
Share of the pages that returned text. A page counts if it held at least one segment that was cut or queried for a commercial link.
| electronics | 36% | 22 of 61 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| home | 26% | 16 of 62 | |
| hosting, VPN | 19% | 11 of 57 | |
| software | 13% | 8 of 60 | |
| finance | 12% | 7 of 56 | |
| control | 0% | 0 of 61 |
Cut and queried are different things
A segment is cut when it is the advertisement: a price button, a "View at
Best Buy", a promo code. A review paragraph that links the product it discusses is
queried instead. It stays in the text with a marker, because it still holds the review.
Nearly all the cut text, 96.5% of it, carries rel="sponsored"; the rest is
paid-placement notices. Nearly all the queried text carries an affiliate link.
| text cut | text queried | |
|---|---|---|
| electronics | 0.9% | 9.0% |
| home | 0.7% | 5.3% |
| hosting, VPN | 0.3% | 1.7% |
| software | 0.2% | 0.9% |
| finance | 0.2% | 0.3% |
| control | 0.0% | 0.1% |
Shares of characters, not paragraphs: an eight-word button and a two-hundred-word review should not weigh the same.
One page from the sample
CNET, Best VPN for Travel, fifth result for "best vpn for streaming". The buy buttons go. The IPVanish review stays, queried, with its 44% speed loss intact. The next paragraph passes untouched.
$2 at Surfshark
IPVanish offers 3,400-plus servers in 113 countries, which is in the same ballpark as NordVPN, Proton VPN, ExpressVPN and Surfshark. In our experience, IPVanish’s internet download speeds were uneven, with a 44% average internet download speed loss in our 2024 testing, with fast speeds marred by occasionally noticeable dips, which could impact gaming or 4K streaming.
IPVanish works fine for casual use, but you can get a VPN with more robust privacy features and faster internet speeds, all of which benefit travel. IPVanish’s user-friendly apps make it a decent choice for beginners seeking a VPN to add peace of mind and allow for streaming abroad. But wallet-friendly VPNs PIA and Surfshark are better options for the money because of their larger server networks.
40% of the results never reached the agent
236 of the 593 pages returned no text at all to a reader without a browser.
| built by JavaScript and empty without it, most of Reddit and YouTube | 107 |
|---|---|
| behind a bot wall, The New York Times, PCMag and Forbes among them | 106 |
| refused another way, eight of them with 402 Payment Required from Investopedia, Allrecipes, Serious Eats and Health | 18 |
| held nothing but hidden text | 5 |
A second pass from a datacenter address read the same share of pages. Reddit answered it with 403 instead of an empty shell, and that was the only difference.
What the first pass got wrong
Version 0.2.1 cut a whole paragraph for one sponsored link anywhere in it. A hand check of 100 random cuts found 16 review paragraphs among them: a LastPass breach history, an IPVanish speed-test loss, advice to cancel a VPN before it renews. They made up 70% of the text cut. Version 0.2.2 cuts only a segment that is the link and queries the prose around one. The same check on the new run found 3 short lines that were themselves the link (a price, a spec, a plan description) and no review paragraph.
| 0.2.1 | 0.2.2 | |
|---|---|---|
| text cut | 2.5% | 0.4% |
| text queried | 0.7% | 2.8% |
| cuts that should have stayed, of 100 | 16 | 3 |
| their share of the text cut | 70% | 11% |
The hand check is in drop_review.tsv, one label per segment.
How it was measured
60 queries, ten in each of five buying categories and ten control. The top
ten Google results for each, through SearXNG, deduplicated: 593 pages, frozen in
urls.txt so a rerun reads the same ones. Each page was read on 28 September
2026 from a residential address in Spain with adassay 0.2.2, rules only: no model judge,
no shared database, an empty local database per page. The queries, the URLs, per-segment
verdicts without text and the scripts are in
research/2026-10-ads.