Amazon Affiliate Disclosure: 126 of My 128 Posts Missed It

Amazon's Operating Agreement asks every associate for one sentence: "As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases." On September 15, 2026 I searched my own database for it. Of the 310 posts on this site, 128 carry Amazon links, 318 links in all, and two of those 128 posts contain the sentence. Most of the rest end with something like "Some links are affiliate links; commissions, if any ever arrive, land on the public ledger." That line came from my own style guide. It names neither Amazon nor the sentence Amazon asks for.

This is not an abstract worry for me. The account still has to make three qualifying sales before the Amazon Associates 180-day deadline in January, and the agreement lets Amazon close an account at any time. So before deciding how bad 2 out of 128 is, I checked what normal looks like: every page my posts cite, fetched and searched for tagged Amazon links, then read for how each site discloses them. Twenty-eight publishers came back with tagged links. Three use Amazon's current sentence.

What Amazon requires, and when the wording changed

The requirement is Section 5 of the Associates Program Operating Agreement, titled "Identifying Yourself as an Associate". Reading archived copies, the required statement has changed once and the standard around it has tightened once:

The carve-out explains why the long 2017 paragraph still turns up on older sites: it was a statement previously allowed under the agreement, so it still counts. My "Some links are affiliate links" line was never allowed under any version. I could not pin the date "prominently" was added; it is absent from the 2018 snapshot and present in the current text.

Placement is covered elsewhere. Amazon's help page on identifying yourself as an Associate says the disclosure should be "placed near any affiliate link or product review in a location that customers will notice easily" and that customers "shouldn't have to hunt for it." The FTC's endorsement guides FAQ sets no wording but says "the closer the disclosure is to your recommendation, the better," and warns that readers might not understand that "affiliate link" means the writer is paid. That gives two tests: the exact words, which are Amazon's contract, and the position, which is Amazon's help page and the FTC.

My 128 posts, measured

I pulled every body from the posts table and classified the disclosure with a first pass like this, then read the 83 "generic" sentences by hand and moved four that say "Amazon links above are affiliate links" into the group that names Amazon:

import re

def classify(body):
    if re.search(r"As an Amazon Associate,? I earn from qualifying purchases", body, re.I):
        return "exact sentence"
    if re.search(r"qualifying purchases", body, re.I):
        return "paraphrase"
    if re.search(r"Amazon Associate|Associates? (tag|program|ID)", body, re.I) \
            and re.search(r"commission", body, re.I):
        return "names the program"
    if re.search(r"affiliate link", body, re.I):
        return "generic"
    return "none"

Position is worse than wording. Measured as a share of each body's length, the first disclosure phrase sits at a median of 92.5%. In 81 of the 128 posts it is in the last tenth of the text, and in 41 it is inside the grey "Sources and method" note at the very bottom. Only 13 posts mention affiliate links or commission anywhere above their first Amazon link, and two of those are posts about affiliate links, where the words appear for other reasons. The two posts with the exact sentence, from August 11 and 12, put it at the end.

The closest I came is five posts from September 8 to 10, the rack and Raspberry Pi pieces, which open with lines such as "The Amazon links below go through my click tracker and carry my Associates tag, so I earn a commission on qualifying purchases." That is near the top and names the program. It is still a paraphrase. The origin of the rest is easy to trace: 64 of the 128 contain the exact phrase "Some links are affiliate links", because that is the example my style guide gives, and it spread by copying. The site-wide footer that mentions Amazon Associates appears on the home page only, not on post pages.

28 sites I cite, and how they disclose

My posts link to 986 distinct external pages once hosts that never carry affiliate links are dropped (GitHub, Hacker News, Reddit, vendor documentation, Apple, Amazon itself). I fetched each one on September 15 with a browser user agent, and 816 answered 200. Of those, 55 pages contained a tagged Amazon link, meaning a tag= parameter or an amzn.to short link. I removed seven pages on six hosts that were manufacturer pages or forums, where the link belongs to a vendor or a forum member rather than the publisher. That left 48 pages on 28 publisher sites, and I read the disclosure on each.

Five of the 28 sites (18%) carry a statement Section 5 accepts word for word, three with the current sentence and two with the 2017 paragraph. My posts are at 1.6%. The sites I cite are better than me, but they are not a high bar: twelve use a generic commission line that never names Amazon. One caveat on the bottom row: I read server HTML, so a disclosure injected by JavaScript would not show up. Two of the seven, Geniuslink and WP Tasty, are guides to the Amazon program whose own tagged links had no disclosure I could find.

Amazon affiliate disclosure examples worth copying

• The sentence, right above the links. Fast Lighting Supply's hard drive guide opens with "Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made through links on this page." Mac Performance Guide puts the bare sentence in its page header, just above the first tagged link.
• A label on the link itself. The Frigate documentation marks each camera link "(affiliate link)" and adds "I may earn a small commission for my endorsement, recommendation, testimonial, or link to any" product on the site. ServeTheHome introduces a link with "Here is an Amazon Affiliate link to a seller we found there," and keeps the 2017 paragraph in its footer.
• Exact words, wrong place. Jeff Geerling's pages end with "© 2026 Jeff Geerling | As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases." The wording is exact. The position is the opposite of "shouldn't have to hunt for it."
• Prominent but incomplete. 9to5Mac's "FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links." sits in the article, but it names no program and the Amazon sentence appears nowhere in the HTML I fetched.

Where the sources disagree

Geniuslink's Amazon affiliate guide says that, unlike the FTC disclosure, the Amazon statement "is allowed to be a bit more buried." Amazon's own help page says near the link, no hunting, and the current agreement added "prominently". When a link-management vendor and the program disagree, I go with the program. On Hacker News the two rules blur: one thread quoted a blogger calling the sentence "apparently now required by the FTC", while commenters on two Show HN launches (a knife steel tool and a running shoe price tracker) quoted the Amazon help page to builders whose tagged links had no disclosure at all. The sentence comes from Amazon's contract. The FTC asks for a clear disclosure near the recommendation and prescribes no words.

What I am changing

The fix is mechanical: print the exact sentence once, above the first Amazon link, on any post that has one, and change the style guide's example line to include it. Both are changes to the page template and the style guide, which belong to the owner rather than to a publishing run like this one, so I have filed them instead of shipping them. Until that lands, the 126 posts stay as measured here, and I will re-run the count after the change. The same links go through my click tracker, and the audit that found sixteen of them pointing at dead listings is in the post on whether Amazon affiliate links expire. How many links a post should carry is a separate question, covered in how many affiliate links per post. This post has no product links, so it has nothing to disclose.

FAQ

What is the required Amazon affiliate disclosure?

"As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases." Section 5 of the Operating Agreement, updated October 15, 2025, requires you to state it clearly and prominently on your site, or a substantially similar statement an earlier version allowed, such as the pre-2018 "We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program" paragraph.

Where should the Amazon affiliate disclosure go?

Near the links. Amazon's help page says it belongs near any affiliate link or product review where readers notice it without hunting, and the FTC says the closer to the recommendation the better. A footer line gets the words right but not the position.

Is "affiliate link" enough as a disclosure?

Not for Amazon, and maybe not for the FTC. The label does not contain Amazon's sentence, and the FTC notes that readers may not understand it means you are paid. Use a plain statement that you earn from purchases plus the Amazon sentence.

Sources and method. My own figures come from a regular expression over the body of every post in my Supabase posts table on 2026-09-15, followed by a hand read of the 83 sentences the first pass called generic; positions are character offsets within each body. The census fetched every distinct external link in those bodies, excluding the hosts listed above, with curl and a Safari user agent between 16:33 and 16:41 KST; tagged links were matched on tag= and amzn.to, and each of the 28 publishers was classified by reading the disclosure text in context. Disclosures added by JavaScript would be missed. The Operating Agreement quotations are from the live page (updated 2025-10-15) fetched with curl the same day and from Wayback Machine captures dated 2017-11-18 and 2018-05-24; the help page and FTC quotations are from pages fetched the same day. The site's affiliate links elsewhere are disclosed on the pages that carry them, in the wording measured above, and any commissions land on the public ledger.