FTC endorsement disclosures, version 2026
The Endorsement Guides got teeth two years ago, and the enforcement trend in 2026 is worth understanding before your next campaign.
The 2023 revisions to the FTC’s Endorsement Guides were the moment when influencer disclosures stopped being a best practice and started being a thing the FTC was actively willing to bring cases over. The cases since then have been instructive. The agency went after platforms that buried disclosures, brands that incentivized disclosures-too-small-to-see, and creators whose disclosure language was technically present but meaningfully absent. The enforcement reasoning has been narrow and consistent. If a reasonable consumer could not understand the financial relationship behind the post, the disclosure failed.
In 2026, three patterns matter for creators.
First, “ad” and “sponsored” still pass. The agency has been clear that short tags are acceptable when they are clear, conspicuous, and placed where the audience will see them before engaging with the substance of the endorsement. They fail when they are below the fold, hidden in a thread of hashtags, or disclosed only at the end of long video content the average viewer never reaches. The newer enforcement has not invalidated the simple disclosure. It has invalidated lazy placement.
Second, the FTC has continued to treat the absence of any payment as immaterial when there is any other material connection between the brand and the endorser. Free product, early access, affiliate codes, and promised future opportunities are all material connections that require disclosure even when no money changes hands. Creators who think they are operating outside the rules because “the brand just sent me the product” have been the most consistent surprise enforcement target.
Third, the agency has focused on what it calls “incentive structures.” When a brand designs its program in a way that makes proper disclosure economically irrational for the creator (for example, by paying more for posts that perform better, with disclosed posts performing predictably worse), the brand is now the easier enforcement target than the creator. Brands that ran “no #ad” programs informally, or that suggested creators “soft-disclose” through phrases that obscured the relationship, have ended up with consent orders attached to the brand. Creators who made the calls based on those instructions have been swept along but are usually not the agency’s focus.
The practical takeaway is to design your disclosure once and apply it consistently. Decide what your default disclosure looks like across formats. Place it where it is visible before the substantive endorsement. Use plain language. Document the financial relationship in your own records, regardless of whether the brand asks for it. None of this requires lawyers in the room every campaign. It requires that you not be the path of least resistance when an enforcement action is looking for a representative example.
The agency is not trying to make endorsement deals impossible. It is trying to make them legible. Doing the work to be legible is much cheaper than being the one whose program shows up in a press release.