Native Advertising: What It Is, the Three Types, Examples and the Disclosure Rules

Native advertising is paid advertising made to look and behave like the content around it: a sponsored post in a social feed, a promoted product among a store's listings, a recommended link under a news article, a paid article on a publisher's site, and now a sponsored suggestion beside an AI answer. It blends in by design, and the one thing that must not blend in is the label that says it is an ad.

What is native advertising?

The industry definition comes from the IAB, the trade body for digital advertising. Its Native Advertising Playbook 2.0, from May 2019, calls native both an aspiration and a suite of ad products: paid ads "so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior" that "the viewer feels the ads belong there."

That is the industry describing what it wants, not proof that readers feel it. The practical test is narrower. A native ad matches the design of the surrounding content, sits where that content sits, behaves the way it behaves when tapped, and is still disclosed as paid. A standard banner usually sits in a slot of its own and looks like an ad.

The three types of native advertising

The IAB's first playbook, in 2013, listed six native ad types. Version 2.0 cut them to three, and says all three must carry a disclosure that they are paid.

• In-feed and in-content ads. The IAB calls in-feed "a dominant native ad format." In-feed ads sit in a list of article summaries, products or posts and match their layout and fonts; in-content ads sit on the article page itself, between paragraphs or below the text.
• Content recommendation ads. Also called content discovery or sponsored content ads, these are the paid links in recommendation widgets. The IAB says a click always takes the reader to another page, either off the site or to another of the publisher's pages.
• Branded content. Paid content from a brand, published in the same format as full editorial and usually made with the publisher's own content team. The other two types can be used to promote it. The IAB added it as a type in 2019; "sponsored content" usually means this.

Three former types were folded in or dropped. Promoted listings on commerce sites are now treated as in-feed ads. Paid search ads "technically meet the IAB definition of native," the playbook says, but the industry treats search as its own category. Banner slots dressed with native elements were removed, though a standard ad size can still count as native if it is styled to match the site.

Native advertising examples

If you have scrolled past a post marked "Sponsored" on Instagram, or clicked a product listed first on a shopping site, you have seen native advertising. The IAB sorts in-feed ads by the kind of feed they sit in, and its own examples cover most of what people meet in a day.

• Content feeds. Sponsored articles and videos in the story lists of news sites and aggregators. The IAB names CNN and Yahoo.
• Product feeds. Sponsored products and app installs mixed into product listings on retail sites and app stores. The IAB names Amazon, Etsy and eBay.
• Social feeds. Sponsored posts, videos and stories among the posts of people you follow. The IAB names Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and notes that social feeds have no in-content ads.
• Recommendation widgets. The "you may also like" or "around the web" modules under an article, where each link is a paid placement.
• Branded content. A full article or video series on a publisher's site, paid for by a brand and labeled as such, often promoted through the publisher's own feeds.
• AI answers. A sponsored product or service shown beside or within an assistant's reply, in the same conversation. This is the newest feed, covered below.

For how native sits among search, display, video, retail media and the rest, see our guide to the types of advertising.

How to judge a native ad placement

Because new native formats keep appearing, the IAB says any format outside its three types should be judged on four questions. They are also the questions to ask before buying any native placement.

• Design. Does the ad match the visual design of the experience it lives in?
• Location. Is it inside the content feed or outside it?
• Ad behavior. Does tapping it do what tapping the surrounding content does, or does it introduce something new, such as sending the reader off-site when everything else stays on it?
• Disclosure. Is it clearly and prominently disclosed as an ad?

A placement can score well on design and badly on behavior. A recommendation link that looks like the site's own stories but sends readers to another site matches the page and breaks its behavior.

Native advertising disclosure rules

In the US the rules come from the FTC's native advertising guide for businesses, published in December 2015, which the IAB's playbook reflects. Its core principle is that an ad "shouldn't suggest or imply to consumers that it's anything other than an ad."

• Wording. "Ad," "Advertisement," "Paid Advertisement," "Sponsored Advertising Content," or close variations.
• Risky wording. "Promoted" and "Promoted Stories" are "at best ambiguous." "Sponsored by [X]" depends on context.
• Logos. A logo or brand name on its own is "not likely adequate."
• Placement. "In front of or above the headline," or on the thumbnail when the image is the focus.
• Prominence. "Large and visible enough for consumers to readily notice," in strong contrast with the background.

The placement rule says more than it seems to. Labels to the right of an ad, or below it in a vertical feed, are less likely to be seen, the guide says, so the label belongs where the eye lands first. The FTC is treating the reader's first glance as the moment that decides whether they were misled, and on a feed that moment is the headline and the image. The guide also asks for each ad to be labeled individually when ads and non-ads are grouped together, for the same terms to be used across a site, and, in video, for the disclosure to come before the advertising message.

Native advertising vs sponsored content vs display ads

• Native advertising is the whole category: any paid placement that takes the form of its surroundings.
• Sponsored content usually means branded content, the paid article or video itself. The IAB lists "sponsored content" as another name for both branded content and content recommendation ads, so check which one a seller means.
• Advertorial is the print-era word for a paid article in a publication's editorial style, the ancestor of branded content.
• Display ads are banners and rich media in ad slots of their own. They are built to be seen as ads, not to match the page.

How big is native advertising?

Native has long been most of display spending. In its 2019 playbook the IAB put native at 63 percent of display spend, and cited eMarketer figures showing that in 2018 almost three-quarters of US native display spending went to social, "partly because almost all social advertising is native," and more than 90 percent went to mobile placements.

Those shares are dated, but the direction has held. Social advertising, the largest native market, came to $117.7 billion in the US in 2025, up 32.6 percent, according to the IAB and PwC, and it overtook search that year. The IAB and PwC do not break out native, so treat the social figure as the closest current proxy.

Native ads in AI answers

AI assistants have become the newest feed. The content is a conversation, and the ad is a sponsored suggestion that appears in it. The IAB's playbook predates these placements, and the FTC's 2015 guide does not mention them. The IAB's own rule for new formats is the one to use: run them through the four questions.

• Design. Google says ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode combine "headlines, descriptions, images, pricing, and landing pages" and are "visually distinguished from organic content." They are styled for the answer, but not as the answer.
• Location. Google says ads "can appear directly within or alongside these AI-generated responses," including in follow-up questions. OpenAI says "you may see ads below a ChatGPT response." Both are inside the conversation, not in a separate slot.
• Ad behavior. The ad follows what the person just asked about, so it continues the conversation's subject rather than interrupting it. Where it leads after a tap differs by platform and format.
• Disclosure. Google labels every one "Sponsored." OpenAI says its ads are "clearly labeled and shown separately from ChatGPT's response."

On those four questions an AI answer ad is native in placement and context and deliberately separate in form: it is placed where the attention is and kept apart from the answer itself. That is the same balance the FTC asked of feeds in 2015. What is unsettled is how readers will treat these ads over time, and whether rules written for headlines and thumbnails will be extended to answers. Our guides to ad placement inside AI chatbots and which AI assistants sell ads go further.

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How to start with native advertising

1. Pick the feed your buyers already read. Social feeds for reach, product feeds if you sell on a marketplace, recommendation widgets for article traffic, AI answers for people describing a need in their own words.
2. Make the ad useful as content. In a feed, an ad is compared with the posts around it. It should read like something worth stopping for in that feed, not a banner shrunk to fit.
3. Keep the label. Use "Ad" or "Sponsored" where the platform places it, and do not crop, recolor or work around it in creative.
4. Buy it like any paid media. Much native inventory is bought programmatically, per click or per thousand impressions. Our guides to paid media, programmatic advertising and AI programmatic advertising cover pricing and buying.
5. Measure past the click. Judge native by what the visit leads to, such as sign-ups or sales, not by clicks alone.