This site earns money when a reader telephones the number on it and reaches a pest control company. That is the whole arrangement, and this page sets it out properly rather than in a footnote.
It costs you nothing. You are not charged, the price you are quoted is not raised, and you take on no obligation by calling.
How it works
The telephone number here is a tracked number supplied by an advertising network. The network routes your call to an independent, licensed operator working in your area, records that the call happened, and pays the site a fee for it.
The fee is for the call, not for a sale. The site is paid the same whether you go on to book anything or hang up after a minute.
This is the standard arrangement for a site like this one, and it is worth understanding what it does and does not create.
What the arrangement cannot buy
No company pays to be covered here. No pest control operator has paid for a mention, a favourable description or a place in any list, because there are no such lists. The site does not name a company as better than another.
No company pays to have something omitted. Nothing has been left out at anyone's request, and nothing will be.
The network does not choose what gets written. It has no involvement in the pages, no review of them before publication, and no ability to have them changed. Where the writing here says something a pest control company would rather it did not — that a swarm does not require a decision that afternoon, that a general inspection is often free, that a quote combining inspection and treatment is not what a contract requires — it says it anyway.
The tension, named
A site paid per telephone call has an obvious interest in you making one. Pretending otherwise would be worse than useless.
So judge the arrangement by what the writing does with it:
- Pages say when there is no hurry, and why a colony several years old will not get materially worse while you get a second quote.
- Pages say what is usually free — a treatment quote, once a company has seen the problem — so nobody pays for something they could have had for nothing.
- Pages say how to check a licence in about a minute, and which category actually covers wood-destroying pests, because a reader who checks is a reader less likely to be overcharged.
- Pages list the questions that make a company uncomfortable, including the one about quoting inspection and treatment separately.
None of that increases calls. It is there because the site is only worth reading if it is there.
How to bypass this entirely
If you would rather not use a tracked number, nothing is lost by going direct.
The Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services publishes a list of currently licensed pesticide businesses, updated weekly, with a public search. Wood-destroying pest control is category 7b under 2VAC5-685-70. You can find an operator, confirm the licence and call them yourself.
How to search the registry and what to ask
The site would rather you did that than call a company you have not checked.
Where else this appears
Every page carrying a telephone number states the arrangement beside the number, before you use it rather than after. That placement is deliberate: a disclosure below a call to action reads as small print, while one beside it is a condition you accepted knowingly.
The site's footer repeats it in full on every page.
Also worth reading
- About this site — who writes it and how
- Privacy — what a call means for your data
- Terms of use — why the operators are independent