Advertising disclosure
Some of what you see here is paid for. Here is exactly which parts, and what that does and does not affect.
The short version
San Fran can show one sponsored placement per answer, and it takes one of two shapes. Either a card below the answer, or a single sponsored line at the end of it. Both are labelled Sponsored. Neither has any influence on what the assistant recommends.
What is paid for
The card that can appear underneath an answer. It is sold through Zeekend, an advertising exchange, and an advertiser pays when it is shown or clicked. Some links may also earn a commission if you buy something after following them.
At most one placement appears per answer. Often there is none at all.
The sponsored line, specifically
This one deserves spelling out, because it sits at the end of an answer rather than beside it. It has three parts, and they have different authors:
- “You might also want to look at” is San Fran’s. An advertiser cannot buy the words that introduce their own advertisement.
- The underlined text is the advertiser’s, and every word they paid for is inside that link and nowhere else.
- “Sponsored” follows it.
So the paid part is the underlined part. That is the whole rule, and it is the reason the line is built this way rather than written as one seamless sentence.
What is not paid for
The answer itself. No advertiser can influence which destinations, hotels, airlines, routes or products get recommended, or have a rival left out. The model that writes the answer is never told what is being advertised, and the placement is chosen afterwards, from the topic of the conversation.
That ordering is the mechanism, not a promise: the answer is finished before anything is sold against it, so there is nothing for a sponsor to lean on. What a sponsor can buy is a labelled addition at the end. What they cannot buy is a word of what came before it.
How to tell them apart
- A sponsored card carries a visible “Sponsored” label at the top, in a bordered, tinted card separated from the answer.
- A sponsored line is separated by a rule, and everything paid for is underlined and linked, with “Sponsored” after it.
- Either way the link opens in a new tab and is marked as sponsored for search engines.
- Nothing paid for ever appears unlabelled, and never in the body of an answer.
If you ever see something that reads as advertising but is not labelled, that is a bug worth telling us about. Write to hello@zeekend.com.
Why sponsorship at all
Running a model costs money per question. The options are to charge for it, to sell the conversation, or to sell a clearly-marked placement beside it. The middle one is off the table — see privacy — so it is the third, done in a way that keeps the answer honest.