Editorial product placement, disclosed and rel=sponsored

Since Google began enforcing its site reputation abuse policy in November 2024, a bought placement sitting in a rented corner of a large publisher's domain is a liability for both parties. The placements we negotiate are the other kind: inside the publication's own editorial process, written by their reviewer, labelled as a commercial relationship and linked with rel="sponsored". They hold their rankings because they are real, and they survive the publisher's next standards audit. What the deal actually is: Access, terms and timing. Never the verdict. We negotiate your inclusion in a roundup or a standing comparison, the test conditions the reviewer will use, the unit or licence they receive, the embargo date, and the correction process for when a specification is printed wrong. What we do not negotiate is the conclusion. A reviewer who can be paid into a recommendation has a recommendation worth nothing, and their readers work that out faster than the invoice clears. Disclosure, in three jurisdictions: Every placement we arrange carries a label. In Poland that means following the UOKiK recommendations issued in 2022 on marking advertising material: in plain Polish, at the top of the piece rather than in a footer. In the United States it means FTC 16 CFR Part 255 disclosure placed next to the claim. Across the EU it means the Unfair Commercial Practices rules on hidden advertising. We write the label into the publisher contract and check the live page against it. Clients ask whether the label suppresses response. It costs a small number of clicks and it removes the risk that a regulator, a competitor or the publication's own editor unwinds the placement six months later. Where this works: Comparison and roundup pages with standing traffic, published by outlets whose readers arrive already deciding. In fitness that is equipment and coaching press with an actual testing bench. In developer tooling it is the trade sites running standing comparisons of build, hosting and observability products, where inclusion is decided by an editor who will install the thing. In legal it is practitioner press and the software directories firm operations managers use. We tell you which of your categories has a roundup worth entering and which has none, and the second answer comes up more often than clients expect. Preparation is most of the work: A reviewer with a badly configured account writes a bad review, and you paid for the placement either way. We prepare the unit, the test data, the onboarding path and a named engineer or coach who answers inside a working day during the test window. For physical product we handle sample logistics into the EU and UK, including the customs paperwork that has killed more review units than any editorial decision. Not included: We do not buy links, we do not write anything published under a journalist's byline, and we do not place in outlets that sell guaranteed positive coverage. We can usually name those outlets in your category. We do not seed product to individual creators either; that is influencer work and other people do it better than we would. Who this is not for: Anyone who wants first place in a ranking. Anyone whose product loses a like-for-like comparison as it stands today, because a disclosed placement will publish that result and we will have helped you buy it. Fix the product and come back. And anyone who needs the placement live this quarter: roundup refresh cycles are set by the publication, and the good ones update on their own schedule, not on your launch date.