Before hiring a blog agency: decide where posts are published and who owns them

Which posts and content you can take with you after a blog agency contract ends depends on the publishing channel item and the copyright clause in the contract. The owner of an agency ID decides whether posts published under that ID stay up or are deleted, and if there is no copyright clause, the economic rights in the content remain with the writer's side.

When a company planning to switch vendors gets the list of past posts, it sometimes finds that the posts were published on a Naver blog under an agency employee's ID and that only the agency holds the content files.

1. The domain and account where blog agency results are recorded

The results of blog agency work (search impressions, visits and external links) are recorded in the statistics of the domain or account where the posts are published. The results of posts PION publishes to a blog under a client's domain are aggregated in the Search Console and GA4 properties for the client's domain. Search impressions and clicks in a Search Console property can be viewed only by the domain owner and the users the owner has granted access to.

2. How your own domain, a blog in your company's name and a blog in the agency's name differ

The publishing channels where your company can decide whether posts stay up or are deleted after the contract ends are a blog on your own domain and a Naver blog in your company's name; on a blog in the agency's name, the account owner decides.

A Naver blog offers no way to verify ownership in Search Console, so it cannot be registered as a Search Console property, and its results are recorded only in Naver Blog statistics. Whether each type of blog can be registered with search engines is covered in Registering a blog with Google and Naver search: what works for each type of blog.

PION receives the access and management permissions needed for the work from the client and publishes posts to a blog under the client's domain, and the client holds the rights to the domain. Once payment is made, PION assigns the copyright in the content to the client, including the right to create derivative works, and when the contract ends, PION hands the operating permissions and accounts over to the client.

3. Who holds copyright in the content by default, and assignment clauses

Copyright in an agency's content arises on the writer's side at the time of creation, and the economic rights within it pass to your company only if the contract contains an assignment clause. Under the definition in Article 2 of the Korean Copyright Act (effective August 11, 2026), the author is the person who created the work, and under Article 10, copyright "arises from the time the work is created." According to Article 9, the author of "a work made for hire that is made public under the name of a juristic person, etc." is that juristic person, etc., unless a contract or employment rules provide otherwise. Content written by an agency's writer is not a work made for hire of your company.

Under Article 45, even if all economic rights are assigned, the right to create derivative works is presumed not to be included unless there is a special agreement. If you have only a license, you can use the content only "within the scope of the permitted method and conditions of use" under Article 46. Moral rights are not assigned because, under Article 14, they are "exclusively personal to the author." If you plan to edit the content and post it again, also include a clause in your contract with the agency stating that the party holding the moral rights will not exercise them.

Check the publishing channel item and the copyright clause in the proposal and the draft contract in the following order.

1. In the deliverables section, check whether you will receive the published URLs and the content files, and note whether the published URLs are on your domain, on a Naver blog in your company's name, or on the agency's domain or blog.
2. Find any clause that mentions copyright, economic rights or intellectual property rights, and note who the rights belong to and whether the right to create derivative works is included. If there is no such clause, mark it as none.
3. If either one sits with the agency, or there is no copyright clause, ask the agency before signing to change the published URLs to your domain or a blog in your company's name, and to change the copyright clause to an assignment clause that includes the right to create derivative works. Also ask for a warranty stating that the agency has obtained the rights from the writers.

Beyond publishing channels and copyright, the questions to ask the agency in a meeting, such as the scope of operations and how reporting works, are listed in Automated blog management checklist to review before choosing a GEO agency.

4. Naver blog accounts cannot be transferred: how agency work should be set up

Under Naver's account policy, members cannot transfer their accounts to anyone else, so you cannot take over a blog the agency ran under its own ID when the contract ends. Naver's account policy (effective September 15, 2023) states: "Members may not sell, transfer, lend or pledge their accounts to others, nor may they permit others to use them."

A blog to be run in your company's name can be created with an organization member account under the same policy, and the administrator of an organization member account manages how members log in and what they post. If the agency offers to handle posting to the Naver blog as well, ask which account and which permissions it will post with, and write the answer into the contract.

Under the Naver Terms of Service (effective July 10, 2025), members who post content grant Naver "rights of use, such as storage, reproduction, modification, public transmission, display, distribution and creation of derivative works (limited to translation)" without limits on duration or territory. To post an agency's content on a Naver blog, the assignment clause must include the right to create derivative works, or the scope of the license must cover the rights to be granted to Naver.

5. Disclosure duties for reviewer programs and review-style campaigns

Writers who are paid through a blog marketing agency must disclose their economic interest in every reviewer-program or review-style post, and your company, as the advertiser, has this disclosure duty too. The Guidelines for Reviewing Labeling and Advertising Involving Recommendations and Endorsements (Korea Fair Trade Commission Established Rule No. 499, effective June 1, 2026) state that "the advertiser or the recommender or endorser must disclose such an economic interest," and list an advertising agency employee posting a product recommendation on a blog as one example of a case requiring disclosure.

The same guidelines present placing the disclosure text for text-based media such as blogs "in the title or at the beginning of each post" as an appropriate method of disclosure, and give the example of using a different font size or color to set it apart from the body text when it is placed at the beginning. A person writing a user review "must have actually used" the product. Your company names the person responsible for reviewing posts before publication in the contract, and that person checks, for each post, where the disclosure of payment is placed and whether the writer actually used the product.

In its Spam policies for Google web search (updated September 2, 2026), Google counts "sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link" as buying or selling links to manipulate rankings. Under the same policy, advertising and sponsored links marked with the rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value are not violations, so if a reviewer-program post includes a link to your site, the person responsible for review also checks this attribute value.

PION's work of writing content and publishing it on a client's site corresponds to owned content creation and publishing, the second stage in the GEO agency service overview. The AI answer visibility basics check includes a question on whether the brand publishes articles on a domain it owns, and after you answer the 8 questions, the results screen shows whether your owned publishing is a weak area.