Site owner’s guide
Before you sell links on your site
Link marketplaces now pay for ads asking site owners to list their sites: set a price, accept orders, get paid per post. The pitch covers payouts and turnaround. These are the four things it tends to leave out, checked before you list rather than after.
We name nobody here, and we do not tell you whether to sell. Policy lines are quoted from Google's spam policies, as updated August 28, 2026. Google's policy covers Google Search. We do not know how each AI answer engine treats paid links, and we will not guess.
Google's policy covers the site the link is on
Ask: Is the link I am being paid for marked as paid?
- Google's spam policies define link spam as creating links “to or from a site” to manipulate rankings. The site selling the link is named as clearly as the site buying it.
- Selling a link for ranking purposes, in Google's words, includes exchanging money for links, or for posts that contain links.
- The same page says a paid link is not a violation when it carries rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". That one attribute is the difference the policy draws.
The tell
A seller pitch that talks about price, payout and turnaround, and never mentions rel attributes or Google's policy.
Read who carries disclosure in the marketplace's terms
Ask: If a paid link is unmarked, whose problem is it under these terms?
- Find the terms' sections on disclosure, link attributes and monitoring before you list. Marketplace terms commonly make disclosure the seller's responsibility.
- Check whether buyers may require a followed link, and whether marking a paid link rel="sponsored" counts as breaking the order.
- Check what monitoring means. Some marketplaces watch each placement and tell the buyer when the link's rel changes, so qualifying a link later can be reported to the person who paid for it.
The tell
Terms that let the buyer insist on an unmarked followed link, or treat adding rel="sponsored" as a delivery failure.
We have no tool for this one. Read the terms yourself, and keep a copy dated the day you listed.
A listing is a public record that your site sells links
Ask: Who can see that my domain is for sale here, and for how long?
- Many marketplaces publish each seller site as its own page, listed in their sitemap and open to search engines. Anyone can read it: a buyer, a competitor, or someone reviewing your site.
- A listing can outlive the person who made it. If you sell the domain later, its new owner inherits the record along with the links.
- Search the marketplace for your domain and look for a listing page in its sitemap before and after you list, so you know what is public and when it went up.
The tell
A catalogue that publishes seller domains as indexable pages, with no way to list privately.
We do not check marketplace catalogues for your domain yet. The manual method above takes a few minutes per marketplace.
Make the page say what it is, in words and in markup
Ask: Does a sponsored post on my site say so, and do its links agree?
- A post that calls itself sponsored, a paid partnership or an advertorial, while its outbound links carry no qualifier, says two different things about itself.
- Links added to older posts for a fee follow the same rule as links in new ones. The age of the post changes nothing.
- Fix the markup on the page, not just the wording: readers see the label, crawlers read the rel.
The tell
Paid posts labelled for readers whose links are unmarked for crawlers.
Where we stand
We do not sell links, placements or mentions, and nothing we run writes to your site. We measure what AI engines say about you, and the free audit reads your own pages.
Run the free audit on your site · Buying AI visibility work instead · What we refuse to do