How we label paid work
Some content on this site is sponsored. Here is exactly how you’ll know — the badge itself, where it appears, and the rules it stands on.
This badge sits at the top of every sponsored story, before the headline’s done its work. Not in a footnote, not in gray-on-white six-point type. It travels with the story — you’ll see it on the story page and on every card that points to it.
“Sponsored” means a company paid for the piece to exist — sponsored it, commissioned it, or supplied it. The badge names the brand whenever we have it on record; a handful of older archive stories carry the plain “Sponsored” badge where the name wasn’t recorded. Either way, if someone paid for it, you know before you’ve read a word.
Editorial coverage of a company is never conditional on that company advertising. The wall between the two is the oldest rule in the building.
Paid work is held to the same accuracy standard as everything else — checked claims, sourced numbers, corrections logged in public. Payment buys the space, not a pass.
Sponsored content never carries a momentum label, never enters the ratings we publish about vendors, and never appears in coverage counts that feed Techtelligence signals as if it were reporting.
That’s a correction, and we treat it like one. Tell the news desk and it goes in the corrections log with everything else we’ve got wrong.