About this handbook
Affiliate Disclosure Handbook is a small, independent set of plain-language chapters about disclosing affiliate relationships fairly, written from published regulator guidance.
Independence and the domain name
Not connected to IAB. This site is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), IAB UK or any of its councils. The domain name was previously used by IAB UK’s affiliate marketing council and is now under different ownership.
In plain terms: the web address of this site contains the letters "iab" because of how the domain was used in the past. For a number of years the domain was the website of the affiliate marketing council of IAB UK, the UK arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade body for the online advertising industry. That use has ended, and the domain now belongs to a different owner with no connection to that organisation.
This handbook is a new and separate publication. It does not speak for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, IAB UK or any of its councils or members. It does not reproduce, summarise or present as its own any code of conduct, charter, guideline or other document published by those organisations, and it does not use their names, logos or designs as branding. If you are looking for material published by IAB UK, look on that organisation's own current website.
The chapters here rely only on documents published by regulators and legislators in the United States and the United Kingdom, plus Google's documentation for the chapter on link attributes. Each chapter lists the documents it is based on.
Who it is for
The handbook is written for people who publish or commission content that carries affiliate links: bloggers, editors of review and comparison sites, newsletter writers, people who post on social media, and the merchants and marketing teams who run affiliate programmes. No legal background is assumed.
How it was made
The site was planned and drafted with the help of an AI system, working from the published guidance named in each chapter. The chapters paraphrase those documents as the author understood them; they do not copy them. On the date shown on each chapter, the cited documents were confirmed to be online; a line-by-line comparison of each chapter with the current text of those documents has not been done yet.
The chapters have not yet been reviewed by an independent human editor or by a lawyer. Until they have, read them as a careful starting point and confirm anything important against the cited documents, which are the authority.
Examples of disclosure wording and of publishing situations are invented to illustrate a point. They are labelled as examples and describe no real person or business. The logo was drawn for this site as a simple vector graphic. The illustrations on this site are AI-generated.
What it does not do
- It does not give legal advice or tell you how a rule applies to your own situation.
- It does not sell services, run an affiliate programme or recommend any product, network or supplier.
- It carries no advertising, affiliate links or sponsored content.
- It sets no cookies and runs no analytics or tracking scripts.
- It does not speak for any regulator or trade body.
Contact
There is no contact route yet: no form, email address or phone number. If one is added later, it will be listed on this page. The editorial policy explains how errors are handled in the meantime.