Disclosure on a Singapore recommendation page, with the dates and fees the regulator publishes about itself
Where the label goes, what counts as a material connection, the wording that fails, and the published cost of having a page checked.
Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 22 October 2026
If you publish a page that recommends products or suppliers and you earn anything from it, the disclosure decision is settled by three things: whether the connection exists at all, where on the page the label sits, and whether a reader sees it before they act. The Advertising Standards Authority of Singapore's own guidelines are the document to work from, and they are short enough to read in full before you draft anything. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and a specific question about your own page belongs with a Singapore lawyer.
The document, with its dates
Read from asas.org.sg on 22 October 2026. The Guidelines on Interactive Marketing Communication and Social Media were issued by the Advertising Standards Authority of Singapore, described on its own page as an advisory council to the Consumers Association of Singapore, on 29 August 2016. They were developed in consultation with social media agencies, public agencies, multinational companies and members of the public. They took effect on 29 August 2016, with marketers and media owners given until 29 September 2016 to adhere to them, a grace period of one month. They are to be read with the rest of the Singapore Code of Advertising Practice, to which they were added.
The Code they sit inside has a stated basic premise, quoted from the authority's own page: all advertisements should be legal, decent, honest and truthful. Most disclosure failures fail against honest before they fail against any specific line.
The three decisions in front of you
- Does a material connection exist. Payment is obvious. So are free product, a commission, a discount code you earn from, a free trial given for the purpose of the review, an event invitation and an affiliate relationship. If anything of value moved, the answer is yes.
- Where does the label go. At the top, with the recommendation, in the same place the reader is looking when they decide. Not in a footer, not behind a link, not at the end of a long article the reader will not reach.
- Will a reader understand it. Plain words beat a tag. A reader who has to work out what a label means has not been told.
The two failures that catch almost everybody
The label that arrives after the decision. A disclosure at the bottom of a ranked list is a disclosure a reader meets after they have already chosen. The point of the label is to inform the decision, so it has to be in front of it.
The page that is entirely commercial and labels only one link. If every item on the page earns you something, a single tag on one link implies the others are neutral. Say at the top, in one sentence, that everything on the page is commercial.
What to write, and what to stop writing
| Stop | Write |
|---|---|
| A tag in a long string of tags at the end of a post | One plain sentence at the top saying what the commercial relationship is |
| We may earn a commission | We earn a commission on every purchase made through the links below |
| A ranking with no criterion | The criterion, the count and the date, so the ranking can be checked |
| Partner, in place of a disclosure | The nature of the partnership in words a reader uses |
| A footer line on a page where the recommendation is at the top | The line beside the recommendation itself |
The may in may earn a commission is the single most common softening in this category, and it reads as hedging to a reader who then finds out that you always do. If you always do, say so.
The cost of having a page checked, published in Singapore dollars
ASAS publishes its advertising advice fees. Read on 22 October 2026, a normal service inside 20 working days is S$600 for a member of AAMS, AMOS or DMAS and S$1,200 for a non member, and an express service inside 10 working days is S$700 and S$1,400 respectively, which with GST are S$654, S$1,308, S$763 and S$1,526. Review starts when payment is received and the turnaround is counted from the day of payment. ASAS states that it is not intended to be a clearing house for the approval of all advertising, so this is the fee for the one page that would be expensive to get wrong.
The newest thing the regulator is watching
ASAS published a media release on 23 March 2026 reporting 379 pieces of advertisement feedback received in 2025, of which seven concerned advertisements involving generative artificial intelligence, which in its own words was more than double the number received in 2023 and 2024 combined, namely three. It is calling on industry bodies to develop guidelines on the use of AI in advertisements, and states the aim directly: not to restrict the practice but to ensure that the resulting advertisements do not mislead consumers.
For a recommendation page that converts into one more line. If any image, voice or body copy on the page was generated, say so where a reader will see it. That is the same discipline as the commercial disclosure and it answers a question readers are starting to ask unprompted.
Questions about disclosure on a Singapore recommendation page
Does this apply to a business to business page
The honesty principle does not change with the audience. A procurement reader is more likely to check the relationship, not less, so the commercial disclosure is more useful on a B2B page rather than optional.
What if an affiliate wrote the content and we only published it
It is on your domain under your name, so the disclosure decision is yours. Settle who reviews syndicated content before it goes up rather than afterwards.
Does a ranking with no affiliate links need a disclosure
It needs a criterion rather than a commercial disclosure. A ranking a reader cannot check is the problem in that case, and the fix is to publish the basis and the count.
How does this compare with other markets
The principles travel and the documents do not. Our page on what a British recommendation page has to disclose, quoted from that regulator's own advice works through a different set of published guidance, and the drafting discipline is the same in both.
Where is the actual guideline text
On the authority's own site, linked from its social media page, and worth reading in full rather than through a summary. Our fetch of the Singapore statute site on 22 October 2026 returned HTTP 200 with the long title, the commencement notes and the arrangement of provisions, and the provision text itself renders in the browser rather than in the served document, which is a fair warning about reading any legal source through a tool rather than opening it.
How we apply this to our own ranking pages
We sell AI visibility measurement, so any page here that ranks tools has a commercial interest sitting behind it, and we say so on the page rather than in a policy. We also publish the figures that do not help us. Across 64 blind readings taken for Singapore on 22 October 2026, with the market written into every question because the search interface we use accepts a country, a language and a location parameter and ignores all three, our own business was named zero times and our domain was cited zero times, and across 597 readings in an earlier three market audit our domain was cited three times. Those are disclosures too, of a kind, and 64 of 102 build specs in our earlier work specifically asked for the commercial interest to be stated on the page. A reader who can see where our interest lies can weigh the rest of it.