Affiliate Disclosures: What the FTC Actually Requires

Fitinty Editorial · August 2026

If you earn a commission when readers buy something you recommended, United States law requires you to tell them. The Federal Trade Commission's endorsement rules are not a formality for big publishers — they apply to a one-person blog exactly as they apply to a media company. The good news: compliance is genuinely simple. The bad news: most of the folk wisdom about it is wrong.

The core rule: clear and conspicuous, before the link

A disclosure works only if a reasonable reader sees it before acting on your recommendation. That kills the most common pattern — a disclosure page linked in the footer. A separate page is good practice as a policy statement, but it does not satisfy the requirement by itself: the disclosure must appear on the content where the affiliate links are, positioned so readers encounter it before or alongside the links, not below them.

Words that work, words that do not

Plain language passes; jargon fails. "If you buy through links on this page, we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you" is fine. "This post may contain affiliate links" is weaker — it hedges about a fact you know. Bare hashtags like #sp, #collab, or a lone #ad buried in twenty other tags have all been called out by the FTC as insufficient. If your grandmother would not understand from the sentence that you get paid, rewrite it.

The honesty rules ride along

Disclosure does not license exaggeration. The same endorsement rules require that you actually hold the opinion you express, that you have used the product if you imply you have, and that any results you describe are typical or clearly framed as not typical. A disclosed lie is still a lie, and the FTC pursues both.

A practical setup

Three layers cover you cleanly: a short in-content disclosure at the top of any page with affiliate links; the disclosure repeated near the links when a page is long; and a site disclosure page describing your affiliate relationships in general. Platforms that manage affiliate offers for you should attach the in-content disclosure automatically — on Fitinty, every published affiliate offer carries its disclosure text with it, so the per-page layer cannot be forgotten. Whatever your tooling, the test stays the same: could a first-time visitor mistake your recommendation for an unpaid one? If yes, the disclosure is not conspicuous enough.

This article is general information, not legal advice. See our affiliate disclosure for how Fitinty itself handles this.