What an Australian recommendation page has to disclose, and the code sources that would not open

If you publish a page that recommends products or suppliers and you earn anything from it, three things settle the disclosure decision: whether a material connection exists, where on the page the label sits, and whether a reader meets it before they act. This page gives those three, the wording that reliably fails, and a dated account of which Australian code sources answered our request and which did not. Nothing here is legal advice, and a specific question about your own page belongs with an Australian lawyer.

The three decisions

1. 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.
2. Where does the label go. At the top, with the recommendation, in the place the reader is looking when they decide. Not in a footer, not behind a link, not at the end of a long article nobody reaches.
3. 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 met after the reader has already chosen. The point of the label is to inform the decision, so it belongs in front of it.

The page that is entirely commercial and labels one link. If every item earns you something, a single tag on one link implies the rest 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 inside a string of tags at the end of a post	One plain sentence at the top stating the commercial relationship
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, used in place of a disclosure	The nature of the partnership in words a reader uses
A footer line on a page whose recommendation is at the top	The line beside the recommendation itself

The may in may earn a commission is the commonest softening in this category and it reads as evasion to a reader who then discovers you always do. If you always do, say so.

What we could read on 22 October 2026, and what we could not

This is relevant rather than procedural, because it tells you how hard the primary sources are to reach and therefore how much of what circulates about them is second hand.

Source	Result
aana.com.au self regulation codes and guidelines page	HTTP 404, carrying 473,318 bytes of fully styled page titled Page not found. Every element of a successful read was present except the status code
aana.com.au root	HTTP 200, titled Australian Association of National Advertisers
adstandards.com.au advertiser code of ethics	HTTP 403 with a body titled Just a moment, which is a browser challenge rather than a refusal
accc.gov.au advertising and selling guide	HTTP 403, a 464 byte edge Access Denied page
legislation.gov.au, consumer law text route	HTTP 200 at 1,358,447 bytes, carrying the arrangement of provisions and no provision text

The first row is the one worth remembering if you ever research this yourself. A 473KB styled page with working navigation can be a 404, and anything that treats a non empty body as a successful read has already accepted a not found page as a source. This is the second regulator style host in this programme to behave that way, and the rule it produces is simple: check the status code, every time, and never conclude anything from a body alone.

Because of those results, this page states no code obligation. What it can point you at is our own live coverage built when those sources were reachable: the disclosure and honesty rules for social media marketing in Australia and the disclosure rules an Australian influencer agency has to work to, both of which carry their own sources.

One thing we noticed and are not claiming

The 404 page served from the association's own domain is titled Page not found, with the title ending in Marketing Association of Australia, while the root of the same domain returns a page titled Australian Association of National Advertisers. That could mean a rename in progress, a shared template, or something else entirely. We are reporting it as an observation and not as a finding, because one page title is not evidence of a renaming and we have not confirmed it with the organisation. Anybody writing a page that names that body by its initials should check the current name before publishing rather than relying on this paragraph.

Questions about disclosure on an Australian 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 disclosure is more useful on a B2B page rather than optional.

What if an affiliate wrote the content and we published it

It is on your domain under your name, so the decision is yours. Settle who reviews syndicated content before it goes up.

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 there, and the fix is publishing 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 that was reachable, and the drafting discipline is the same.

Should generated images be labelled

Decide your position now rather than after a complaint. A reader who spots an unlabelled generated image on a recommendation page distrusts the recommendation, which costs more than the label would.

Why a status code is the only thing that distinguishes a source from a 404

The most transferable thing on this page is not a disclosure rule. It is that an industry association's codes page returned HTTP 404 on 22 October 2026 while serving 473,318 bytes of fully styled page with working navigation, and that the advertising standards body's code page returned HTTP 403 with a browser challenge body on the same day. Anybody researching Australian disclosure obligations with a script, an agent or an assistant can collect both of those as sources and never know. Check the status code on every fetch and nothing else will save you, which is the same discipline this site applies to its own numbers. On ours: across 64 blind Australian readings 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 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 our commercial interest and our performance disclosed on the same page, which 64 of 102 build specs in our earlier work asked for by name. AI Knows Us runs that measurement across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, and a reader who can see where our interest lies can weigh the rest of it.