Dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias, translation, calculators and unit converters, statistics and data lookups, legal and medical reference, academic journals and papers, how-to and instructional guides not tied to a single hobby, obituary and public-record search, maps and atlases. The defining trait is that visitors arrive with a specific question and leave once it is answered. Choose education-careers instead when the site teaches a subject through courses, lessons or degree and job guidance. We currently track 752 Reference sites, and this page lists them with the advertising networks each one runs. The most common partner in this category is Ezoic, which appears on 315 of them — a useful signal of who actually buys this kind of inventory, as opposed to who says they do.
Publishers use this page to see which networks accept sites like theirs and at what authority level; buyers use it to size the inventory available in a category before approaching anyone. The table is ordered by authority, so the strongest sites in Reference are at the top. Showing only sites confirmed by both parties — the toggle under “What the verification marks mean” shows all 752.
Every listing starts as a network naming the site in its own published seller list. We then read the site’s ads.txt — the file where a publisher names the ad companies it authorises — to see whether the site names the network back.
By share of sites in this category, Ezoic is the most common partner — it appears on 315 of the 752 Reference sites we track. "Best" depends on your traffic and authority, so compare the tier and median authority on each network's page before applying.
Most publishers carry more than one. The "Also uses" column in the table shows the stack on each individual site, which is a more reliable answer for your own situation than an average.
The average site in Reference scores 24. Each network page shows its own median, which is the more useful number: it tells you the level of site that network actually accepts, rather than the level it advertises.
Each site is classified from the text of its own homepage, into one category. A site that spans two categories is filed under the dominant one, so a recipe blog that also reviews cookware appears here rather than in Shopping.