Researching what happens after the click
Affiliate Link Audit studies a specific problem in publisher operations: an affiliate link can still respond successfully while the recommendation behind it has degraded.
A reader does not experience an affiliate link as an HTTP status code. They experience a path: recommendation → click → redirect or tracking infrastructure → merchant destination → product or offer. A useful audit has to look farther down that path than “did the URL return an error?”
Our research focuses on the parts of that path we can observe responsibly: destination behavior, unavailable products or offers, redirects that lose the intended destination, expired or inactive commercial paths, and cases where automated verification is blocked or inconclusive.
We deliberately do not claim that an automated scan can prove whether a merchant credited a specific commission. When the evidence does not support a stronger conclusion, the finding stays in Needs Attention rather than being presented as confirmed broken.
Current evidence resources
Why 200 OK Doesn't Mean an Affiliate Link Is Healthy
A technical guide to the gap between a successful HTTP response and a commercially useful destination. It explains why product availability, destination intent, program continuity, and verification quality are separate questions.
Sample Affiliate Revenue Audit Report
See the structure publishers receive: prioritized findings, the evidence we can explain, and a recommended next step for each customer-facing issue.
Affiliate Link Audit for Publishers
A plain-language explanation of who the service is for, what the audit follows, what it does not claim, and how the free sample differs from the $97 full audit.
How we treat evidence
Published research numbers are not estimated for marketing copy. Before an aggregate statistic becomes a headline, its source query or export, observation period, denominator, and inclusion rules must be reconciled against production evidence.
That distinction matters because these are not interchangeable measurements:
- search-result rows returned by a discovery provider;
- candidate publisher domains;
- domains admitted for contact or scanning;
- publishers actually scanned;
- pages rendered;
- monetized links evaluated;
- publishers with customer-facing findings.
A number about one layer must not be relabeled as a number about another.
Historical benchmark policy
A benchmark belongs to the period and dataset that produced it. Affiliate Link Health Benchmark 2026 will remain a 2026 research asset once published. It will not be silently renamed to look current in a later year.
If a future dataset supports a new benchmark, it earns its own publication. The research hub remains the timeless place where those studies can be compared.
What is being prepared
Two original-data publications are held behind production-evidence review:
- Affiliate Link Health Benchmark 2026 — the broad benchmark and methodology record;
- Travel Publisher Link Health Research — a vertical study using verified travel/rewards scan evidence.
They will be published only after the underlying denominators and findings are independently reconciled. Until then, this page intentionally does not repeat unverified aggregate numbers from social posts or earlier campaign summaries.
Why this exists
Affiliate publishers often have years of recommendations spread across old posts, comparison pages, roundups, and evergreen guides. Those pages can continue attracting readers long after the links were originally placed.
The operating question is therefore not only “is the page still online?” or “did the link return 200?” It is:
Does this click still take the reader somewhere useful, and do we have enough evidence to trust the monetization path behind the recommendation?
That is the question our research, sample reports, and paid audits are built around.