Disclosure
LakeLevelNow is a free, independent site built by one person. It is paid for by display ads, one local sponsor per lake, readers who choose to chip in, and, once approved, affiliate links. None of them change a reading.
Display ads
Lake pages can show up to two Google AdSense ads, always below the live gauge, never above it. They load only for visitors outside the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland. The page asks a small Cloudflare endpoint on our own Worker which country the request comes from, uses the answer for that page view only and stores nothing. If the country is in that region, unknown, or the lookup fails, no ad code loads at all. Where ads do load, third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve and measure ads based on your earlier visits to this site or to other sites; if your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, we ask Google for non-personalized ads. You can read how Google uses data at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. You can turn off personalized ads in Google's Ads Settings at adssettings.google.com, or opt out of other vendors' advertising cookies at aboutads.info/choices.
Lake sponsors
One local business per lake can sponsor that lake's page for $49 a month. A sponsored mention is labelled as sponsored and its link carries rel="sponsored". Sponsors never see or influence the data. Details are on the advertise page.
Affiliate links
No affiliate link is live on LakeLevelNow today. If we add charter or boat-rental partners later, those links will be marked, carry rel="sponsored nofollow", and earn us a commission at no cost to you.
Reader support
Some pages carry a "Chip in" button. It opens a Stripe payment page where you choose the amount. It is a one-off gift, not a subscription, and you get nothing extra for it besides our thanks.
Editorial independence
The water-level data is never influenced by ads, sponsors or affiliate relationships. Readings come from USGS, CDEC, USBR and TWDB public feeds and are shown the same way on every page. Levels and percent full are never modified to favor anyone.
Analytics and privacy
Updated 5 September 2026. We use Google Analytics 4 to measure visits, views of almanac offers, sample views, and checkout clicks. Google Analytics uses first-party cookies to distinguish browsers and sessions. Our events send public page paths and product identifiers, not email addresses, payment details, or anything entered into a tool. Page query strings and fragments are excluded. Google signals and advertising personalization are disabled. This tracking does not load when your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.
A checkout click measures interest, not a completed payment. Stripe processes payments separately. Our existing first-party almanac counter also records event names, lake slugs, and placement identifiers.
If you have questions, email hello@lakelevelnow.com.