Cookie policy

A cookie is a small text file a website asks your browser to store. Some are essential to make a site work; others watch what you do. UK law — the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, alongside the UK GDPR — allows the first kind without permission and requires informed consent for the rest.

This policy also covers similar technologies such as local storage and tracking pixels, which are treated exactly the same way.

These run without consent because the site cannot function without them. They set no advertising identifiers and are never shared.

• assaylist_consent — records the cookie choices you made, the date you made them and the policy version they were made against. Expires after six months. Without it we would have to ask you on every page.
• Session and security cookies set by our hosting platform to route requests and protect against cross-site request forgery. These expire when you close your browser.

With your permission we use Google Analytics 4 to understand which reviews and guides are read, so we know what to keep up to date. IP anonymisation is enabled.

Nothing loads before you consent. If you decline, or have not yet chosen, the Google Analytics script is never requested — no connection is made and no cookie is set. Hiding a banner while the tag fires underneath is not consent, and we do not do it.

Assaylist is funded by affiliate commissions. When you click through to a vendor from one of our links and you have agreed to this category, we record which product you clicked and when, so we can reconcile our reporting with the affiliate network's.

If you decline this category, the link still works exactly as normal — you are taken to the vendor just the same. We simply do not write the record on our side. The affiliate network may still set its own cookie once you arrive on the vendor's site; that is governed by their policy, not ours.

More about how we are funded is in our affiliate disclosure.

You can change or withdraw your consent at any time, and it takes one click. Cookie preferences to reopen the panel. The same link sits in the footer of every page.

You can also block or delete cookies in your browser settings. Doing so for the strictly necessary cookie means you will be asked for your preferences on every visit.

Where a third party sets a cookie through this site — Google for analytics, an affiliate network on click-through — that organisation is an independent controller for its own processing. We name each of them in our privacy policy, and you should read their policies if you want the full picture of what they do with the data.

We do not embed third-party advertising, social media trackers or comment widgets anywhere on this site.

If we add a cookie or change what an existing one does, we update this page and increment the consent policy version. That resets your stored choice, so you will be asked again rather than having an old decision applied to something new.