A link marked with
rel="sponsored", introduced by Google in September 2019 alongside rel="ugc" as a finer-grained alternative to nofollow. Use it for links you've been paid to publish — affiliate links, sponsored-post outbound links, sidebar advertisements. Treated by Google as a hint rather than a strict directive. Failing to mark paid links is a violation of Google's link-spam policies and can trigger a manual action. The older convention of using only rel="nofollow" is still acceptable, but sponsored is more honest about what's happening.