Do I have to tell people I get a reward for sharing a link? — a straight answer for someone who is not an influencer

You are about to send a link to four people. If one of them walks in, you get something back from the business. The question that stops you for a second — and it is the right question — is whether you have to say so.

The short answer is yes, and it takes one sentence. The longer answer is more useful, because it explains where the line actually sits, what happens if you are on the wrong side of it, and why everything you found while looking this up was written for somebody other than you.

If you get something when the person turns up, say so in the same message as the link — before they tap it, not after.

Why nothing you found answers the question

Search this and you get pages telling businesses to "require your ambassadors to disclose" and to "add a compliance clause to your referral programme". You are in every one of those sentences, but always as the object of them: the thing the brand is supposed to manage. Nobody writes the version where you are the person holding the phone, deciding what to type above the link.

What the rules actually say

In the United States, the FTC's Endorsement Guides — revised in 2023, the first update since 2009 — turn on a "material connection": a relationship between you and the business that your audience would not expect, and that might change how they read your recommendation. Being paid counts. So does getting something free or discounted. A reward for sending customers sits squarely inside that, whether the reward is cash or a free dessert.

In Canada the duty comes from the deceptive marketing provisions of the Competition Act, and the Competition Bureau's guidance is unusually specific about where the disclosure has to sit: prominent, visible on every device, and readable without tapping to expand a caption. It also says plainly that tagging the business, posting a discount code or linking to an affiliate page is unlikely on its own to be enough. A link is not a disclosure. Words are.

What counts as a connection worth naming is broader than most people assume:

• Cash, a payment, a commission — obviously.
• Something free, or something discounted: a meal, a treatment, a night.
• Store credit or a voucher. A free coffee once enough people have come in is still a reward.
• A family tie or a job. You do not have to be paid for the connection to be worth naming.

And one thing that surprises people: the duty does not sit only on you. Both regulators put it on the business as well, and the FTC's 2023 revision spells out the exposure of the intermediary in the middle — the platform that handed you the link. That is why a well-built one gives you the sentence instead of hoping you thought of it.

"But it's just my group chat"

This is the part people actually want settled, so here is the honest version. Regulators write about endorsements that reach an audience. A public story, a Facebook post, a neighbourhood group, a community forum — those are not borderline cases, they are the case the rules were written for. A message to one person you know well is the case people argue about, and the argument is not worth your afternoon, because the sentence that ends it is one line long.

There is also a practical asymmetry worth noticing. Saying it costs you a line of text. Not saying it costs you the moment your friend works it out on their own — which is a worse conversation than any of this, and is the real risk to an ordinary person, long before anything a regulator would ever look at.

How to word it, so it doesn't read like a legal notice

Plain language beats terminology every time. "#aff", "#sp" and "collab" are precisely the kind of shorthand regulators single out as inadequate, because they are only legible to people already inside the industry. Any of these does the job:

• "I get a reward if you use this link."
• "Full disclosure — I get something if you actually go."
• "They give me something when people come in through this, so you know."

Put it with the link, not at the bottom of a block of hashtags and not in a bio nobody opens. If you are posting somewhere that expects a tag, #Ad or #Publicité goes on top of the sentence, not instead of it.

What Muchsy does about this, and what it cannot do

When you copy your message, it arrives in two halves. The pitch is yours: a text box you can rewrite entirely, in your own words, with a reset button if you go too far — because a canned sentence in someone else's voice is a sentence that never gets sent. The last line is not yours to edit, and it is appended to every copy: "I get a reward if you use this link." The share buttons carry the same text into whichever app you tap.

Now the part a marketing page would leave out. There is also a plain "copy link" button that copies the bare address and nothing else — use that one and the sentence is yours to write. And once the message is on your clipboard it is yours; you can delete the last line before you send it. Muchsy cannot see where you post, cannot read your messages, and does not scan captions for a disclosure. Nobody is checking.

The sentence ships inside the message rather than behind a tickbox for one reason. A tickbox saying "I confirm this post is an advertisement" works on someone who already thinks of themselves as an advertiser. It does nothing for a person sending a café to four friends, who does not — and who is right about that in every sense except the one the rules care about.

Does saying it kill the recommendation?

This is the real objection, and it deserves an answer rather than a polite silence. The worry is that admitting you benefit turns a recommendation into an ad, and people scroll past ads.

Two things. First, the only connection you have to name is the one they would not expect — and they already expect you to like the place, so that part needs no defending. Second, whatever the sentence costs you at the moment you send it is smaller than what it costs when someone finds out afterwards. A recommendation survives being honest. It does not always survive being found out.

One sentence, in the same message, before the tap. That is the whole obligation — and if it felt complicated, that is mostly because everything written about it was addressed to a brand.