Trust & Verification

Business model — directory, not reseller

China LLM Directory is an independent editorial directory. We aggregate publicly-available pricing, benchmarks, and provider metadata and present them in comparison format. We earn affiliate commission on some outbound links, but we do not resell any Provider's API, do not charge a markup on usage, and do not act as a payment intermediary.

When you click a "Visit <Provider> →" button, you leave our site. Contracts, payments, support, and any data you send are between you and the Provider directly. The commission — if any — is paid to us by the Provider out of their own budget, not added to your bill.

See our Affiliate Disclosure for the long-form FTC §255 version, and our Editorial Independence Policy for the exhaustive list of what Sponsored / Featured status can and cannot do (spoiler: it cannot change rankings, comparison verdicts, or the "Verified official" status below).

How we verify the "Real Official Page"

For every Provider in the directory we publish a Chinese portal URL, an English portal URL when one exists, and an ICP 备案号 (Chinese legal registration number) when we have it. The "Verified official — not a wrapper site" badge on each Provider Profile means we ran all three of these checks:

1. Source of truth cross-reference. We start from the Provider's own official Twitter / LinkedIn / press release / legal filings and follow those to the canonical URL. Search-result position is never the signal — wrapper sites can rank high.
2. ICP 备案 check (for China-registered domains). Every legitimate Chinese LLM Provider operating a public website is required to file a 备案 record under their corporate name. We look up the domain in beian.miit.gov.cn and verify that the filing subject matches the Provider's known legal entity. Wrapper sites almost never have ICP records tied to the brand they imitate.
3. Domain age check. We WHOIS-query the domain to confirm its registration date. Wrapper sites are often set up within weeks of a new model launch; real Provider domains are years old.

Once verified, we set the officialDomainVerifiedAt timestamp on the Provider record. The OfficialPagePanel on each Profile shows "Last verified N days ago" — if that number exceeds 90 we display an amber warning and the Provider enters the re-verification queue.

Affiliate vs. the "Real Official" link

We keep two separate categories of outbound link, on purpose:

• Real Official URLs (the OfficialPagePanel sidebar on every Provider Profile). These are bare links — no affiliate parameter, no tracking, no redirect. The trust signal depends on passing link equity to the real vendor, not monetizing the click.
• "Try <Provider>" / "Get a Quote" CTAs (below the profile body, on comparison pages, at the end of blog posts). These may carry an affiliate parameter. Commission status never affects ranking or which Provider we recommend.

This separation is codified in ADR-013 §3 inside our architecture docs. It is a published, reviewable contract, not a marketing promise.

Editorial independence

A Provider may pay for a "Featured" slot. Featured slots are always labeled "Sponsored" and do not alter default sort order on data surfaces (/pricing, /rankings, comparison pages). The exhaustive list of what Sponsored status can and cannot do is on our Editorial Independence Policy. The annual transparency report lives at Sponsorship Disclosure Archive.

Report an error or a suspected wrapper site

If you believe we've published the wrong "Real Official" URL for a Provider, or you've spotted a wrapper site we should be warning readers about, email hello@china-llm.com. We respond within seven days and publish corrections with an updated officialDomainVerifiedAt timestamp.

Contact

All trust / verification / editorial questions: hello@china-llm.com. Privacy-specific questions: see Privacy Policy. Legal / terms questions: see Terms of Service.