rel="sponsored" is a value of the rel attribute on links. It marks links that are advertisements or paid placements. Google introduced it in September 2019, together with ugc.
When to use it
Google asks site owners to mark advertising and paid placements with sponsored. nofollow remains an acceptable value for these links, though Google lists sponsored as preferred. The spam policies state that buying or selling links for ranking purposes is link spam, and that such links are not a violation when qualified with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored". Affiliate links usually fall under this value as well, since they involve compensation.
| Value | Purpose according to Google | Required? | How Google treats it |
|---|---|---|---|
no rel value (often called "dofollow") | regular link that Google is expected to fetch and parse without qualification | –; Google has no dofollow value | Google can follow and parse the link |
rel="sponsored" (this term) | advertisements and paid placements | for paid links, sponsored (preferred) or nofollow; otherwise link spam under the spam policies | hint; links with this value are generally not followed |
rel="ugc" | links in user-generated content such as comments and forum posts | recommended; can be removed for members with a consistent record of high-quality contributions | hint; links with this value are generally not followed |
rel="nofollow" | when no other value applies and you'd rather Google not associate your site with the target or crawl it from your site | no; still acceptable for paid links | hint, for ranking since 10 Sept 2019 and for crawling and indexing since 1 March 2020 |
nofollow as a robots meta rule | don't follow the links on this page | no | applies to every link on the page |
Target pages can still be found and crawled through sitemaps or links from other sites. Several values can be combined, separated by spaces or commas, for example ugc nofollow. For links within your own site, Google points to a robots.txt Disallow rule, and to noindex for keeping a page out of the index. Sources: Google Search Central: Qualify your outbound links to Google (last updated 2025-12-10); Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search, link spam (last updated 2026-08-28); Google Search Central Blog: Evolving "nofollow" – new ways to identify the nature of links (2019-09-10); Google Search Central: Robots meta tag specifications, nofollow. Last checked: .
A hint, not a command
Google treats sponsored, ugc and nofollow as hints for ranking and crawling. For nofollow that applies since March 1, 2020. Multiple values can be combined in one attribute, separated by a space or a comma.
Example
<a href="https://partner.example/" rel="sponsored">Partner</a>
<a href="https://partner.example/" rel="sponsored nofollow">Partner</a>
Sources
- Qualify your outbound links to Google – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Evolving 'nofollow' – new ways to identify the nature of links – Google Search Central Blog (September 2019)developers.google.com
- Spam policies for Google web search – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Ahrefs: Sponsored link attribute (secondary)ahrefs.com
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