Does Paying a Comparison Site Get a Gas Marketer a Better Spot?
Ten Georgia natural gas marketers filed a standard 12-month fixed plan with the Public Service Commission for September 2026. Their rates are refiled every month. And a common way people shop is to search for “cheapest natural gas plan Georgia” and click one of the first results.
Those results are usually commercial comparison sites, and every one we checked is paid by the marketers it lists. Our September review of six Georgia comparison tools has the details and sources; here is what they say about themselves.
- Georgia Gas Savings marks some listings “Sponsored.” On September 16, 2026 that label sat on a Georgia Natural Gas plan and a Constellation 36-month plan. It lists five marketers; the other five on the PSC’s fixed chart do not appear.
- NaturalGasPlans.com discloses: “We receive compensation from these partners when a customer enrolls … We are also paid for featured ad placements.”
- EnergyBot says: “When you enroll with a provider through our site, that provider pays us a referral fee,” and “we do not list every licensed provider.”
- Energyshop says it “earns signup or referral fees from some of the suppliers listed.”
None of this is hidden; each site discloses it somewhere. But it shapes what a shopper sees. A marketer that does not pay may not be listed at all, and a paid listing can carry a badge that a cheaper, unpaid plan does not. A shopper who opens three of these sites in three tabs can still end up comparing overlapping versions of the same paid list.
The only unpaid source is hard to use
The PSC’s own Marketers Pricing Index has no commercial interest at all. Every certificated marketer files there, and the fixed chart lists all of them with the filed rate, service charge, termination fee, and the PSC’s estimate of a typical customer’s annual bill.
It is also a wide monthly PDF built for regulators. It cannot be sorted, it is hard to read on a phone, fixed, variable, senior and prepay plans are separate files, and last month’s rates are a different document.
So the choice a Georgia gas shopper faces is: work through a government PDF, or use a comparison site that has a financial relationship with the marketers it ranks.
What we built instead
Open Natural Gas takes the PSC’s filings each month and ranks every marketer by estimated annual cost, using the PSC’s own assumption of 641 therms a year plus the service charge and the Atlanta Gas Light base charge. It shows PSC complaint counts and Google review scores next to the price, and links every table to the PSC filing it came from.
Marketers pay nothing: no placement fees, no referral fees, no leads, no affiliate links. The sign-up links go straight to the marketer’s own site and earn us nothing. The site is built by adPharos, an Atlanta marketing agency whose clients include True Natural Gas; the full disclosure and ranking formula are on the methodology page.
One question to ask any comparison site
If you are shopping for a gas rate in Georgia, ask the site you are using: does paying you more get a marketer a better spot on this page?
Our answer is no, because no marketer pays us anything. If a site’s answer is yes, or it will not say, check its list against the PSC chart before you sign up.
The Georgia Public Service Commission does not rank or endorse marketers.