---
title: "Sponsored Link Statistics: Only 0.4% of News Publisher Links"
url: https://www.suffdigital.com/resources/data-studies/publisher-links-sponsored-tag
description: "Sponsored link statistics: 0.4% of links from news publishers are marked sponsored, against 2.8% of links from online stores. See the data."
lang: en
---
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Just **0.4%** of links from news publishers carry the "sponsored" label Google asks sites to put on paid links, against 2.8% of links from online stores. 96.1% of news publisher links carry no label of any kind, so almost every link a brand earns from the press counts in full.
Analysis of 20,774 links from 4,040 news publishers · links to 750 brand and small business websites, September 2026
## Key Findings
1. 1. **0.4%** of links from news publishers are marked sponsored, fewer than one in 200, and 96.1% of news publisher links carry no sponsored, nofollow or ugc label at all. Copy stat
2. 2. **3.6%** of links from news publishers are marked nofollow, less than half the 8.3% rate across links from all types of website. Copy stat
3. 3. Links from online stores are marked sponsored **2.8%** of the time, seven times the 0.4% rate for links from news publishers. Copy stat
4. 4. Only **23** news publishers used the sponsored label, and two of them, BuzzFeed with 28 links and CBS News with 16, account for more than half of all sponsored news publisher links. Copy stat
5. 5. **36.9%** of links from news publishers sit in the body of an article, the most common spot on the page, and 90.5% are text links rather than images. Copy stat
## Summary
A brand gets a mention in a news story, with a link to its website. Whether that link helps the brand in Google depends partly on a small label hidden in the page code. Google asks sites to mark paid links as "sponsored", so search engines know not to count them as a genuine recommendation. A link marked "nofollow" asks search engines to ignore it for ranking purposes.
For anyone doing PR or SEO, that label decides the value of a press hit. A link with no label passes full credit to the site it points at. A link with a sponsored or nofollow label is worth traffic, but little or nothing for rankings. If publishers labeled most of their outbound links, earning press coverage would do far less for search visibility.
They do not. Just **0.4%** of links from news publishers are marked sponsored, 3.6% nofollow and 0.4% ugc, the label for user comments and forum posts. **96.1%** carry none of the three. Online stores use the sponsored label seven times as often, and the few publishers that use it apply it mostly to shopping roundups and personal finance articles.
## What we measured
On September 23, 2026 we collected the live backlinks pointing to 750 US brand and small business websites and kept the 20,774 links that come from 4,040 news and publisher websites. For each link we recorded which label it carried, where on the page it sat, and whether it was a text link or an image. We compared those publisher links with all 546,079 live links to the same 750 websites, grouped by the type of site the link comes from: news publishers, online stores, organizations, blogs and other sites.
A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Three labels change how search engines treat it: "sponsored" marks a paid or commercial link, "nofollow" asks search engines not to count the link, and "ugc" marks user-generated content such as comments. A link with none of the three is a standard, followed link that search engines count in full. A link can carry more than one label.
## Sponsored labels are rare on news publisher links
0.4%
of links from news publishers are marked sponsored.
Of 20,774 live links from news publishers, 85 were marked sponsored, 738 nofollow and 74 ugc. Put together, 3.9% of news publisher links carry at least one of the three labels, and 96.1% carry none. For a brand, that means nearly every news link it earns is a standard link that search engines count.
News publisher links by link label
Sponsored
0.4%
Nofollow
3.6%
Ugc
0.4%
Any of the three
3.9%
None of the three
96.1%
Source: Suff Digital analysis of 20,774 links from 4,040 news publishers · links to 750 brand and small business websites, September 2026
News publishers are also lighter users of nofollow than the web as a whole. Across links from all types of website, 8.3% are nofollow and 0.8% sponsored, so a news publisher link is less than half as likely as the average link to carry a nofollow label. The labels also rarely travel together: only 10 of the 85 sponsored news publisher links also carried nofollow.
## A handful of publishers use the sponsored label
Only 23 of the 4,040 news publishers used the sponsored label at all, and two of them account for more than half of the 85 sponsored links: BuzzFeed with 28 and CBS News with 16. Wired and Architectural Digest used it 6 times each, New York Magazine 5 times and Popular Science 3 times, mostly on product guides such as best couch and best standing desk roundups, where affiliate and other commercial links are common. All 16 sponsored CBS News links point to money.com from personal finance articles.
Sponsored links by publisher
buzzfeed.com
28
cbsnews.com
16
wired.com
6
architecturaldigest.com
6
nymag.com
5
popsci.com
3
Sponsored links look different from ordinary news links. 31 of the 85 are image links, far above the 9.4% of all news publisher links that are images, because shopping roundups link product photos straight to the store. Many point at retailers, such as petalandpup.com with 23 sponsored links and us.princesspolly.com with 8.
## Online stores label links sponsored seven times as often as publishers
The sponsored label is far more common outside the news. 2.8% of links from online stores are marked sponsored, seven times the 0.4% rate for news publishers, and 2.1% of links from organization websites are. Blogs sit close to news publishers at 0.5%. Across links from all types of website, 0.8% are sponsored.
Links marked sponsored by type of linking website
News publishers
0.4%
Online stores
2.8%
Organizations
2.1%
Unclassified sites
0.6%
Blogs
0.5%
Blogs and organizations
0.3%
All websites
0.8%
Nofollow follows a different pattern. 11.9% of links from organization websites and 11.6% from unclassified sites are nofollow, against 3.6% from news publishers, 3% from online stores and 4.1% from blogs. News coverage is among the least filtered sources of links a brand can get.
## Most publisher links sit in the article itself
36.9% of links from news publishers sit in the body of an article, the spot where a reader is most likely to click and where a link reads as an editorial citation. Another 14.5% sit in other page sections, 11.3% in headers and 11.3% in the main content area outside the article, with smaller shares in navigation (5.7%), footers (2.6%) and sidebars (1.6%). 90.5% of news publisher links are text links.
Nofollow is most common in page sections outside the article, at 8.2%, and absent from headers and navigation. Inside the article body it is 3.7%, so a link placed in the story itself is almost always a standard, counted link.
## What this means for PR and SEO teams
Earned coverage is worth more for search than many teams assume. With 96.1% of news publisher links carrying no label, a story that links to your site almost always passes full credit, and the link usually sits in the article text where readers click. That makes a genuine news story, backed by data or an expert comment, one of the most valuable links a brand can earn.
Paid placements are different. The sponsored label shows up mostly on shopping roundups and personal finance articles, where commercial and affiliate links are common. If you pay for a product placement, expect the label and value the link for the traffic and sales it sends rather than for rankings.
When you review your own backlinks, count news links separately from directory, forum and store links: the labels, and the value, differ sharply by source. Our link building services (https://www.suffdigital.com/seo/seo-link-building-services) focus on earned editorial links from publishers for this reason.
## Embed this research
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Source: Only 0.4% of Links From News Publishers Are Marked Sponsored vs 2.8% From Online Stores - Suff Digital
## Cite this study
APA
Suff Digital. (2026). Only 0.4% of Links From News Publishers Are Marked Sponsored vs 2.8% From Online Stores. https://www.suffdigital.com/resources/data-studies/publisher-links-sponsored-tag
Plain link
Only 0.4% of Links From News Publishers Are Marked Sponsored vs 2.8% From Online Stores - Suff Digital - https://www.suffdigital.com/resources/data-studies/publisher-links-sponsored-tag
## Frequently asked questions
### What share of news publisher links are marked sponsored?
### How many news publisher links are nofollow?
### Which publishers use the sponsored label most?
### Are links from news sites followed or nofollow?
## Related studies
- Digital PR 70% of News Articles in Google News Never Link to a Company Website: https://www.suffdigital.com/resources/data-studies/news-articles-outbound-links
- Digital PR The New York Times Is the Website Journalists Link to Most, in 2.8% of News Articles: https://www.suffdigital.com/resources/data-studies/most-linked-sources-news
- Digital PR Local News Articles Carry 2.2 Times as Many Business Links as National News Articles: https://www.suffdigital.com/resources/data-studies/local-vs-national-news-links
- Digital PR 38.5% of Brand Mentions on News Pages Are Negative vs 26.2% on Other Websites: https://www.suffdigital.com/resources/data-studies/negative-brand-mentions-online
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