Definition

Affiliate network

An affiliate network is a platform sitting between merchants and publishers that handles tracking, reporting, and payments for many programs at once — Awin, Impact, CJ, Rakuten, ShareASale being the majors. Publishers join once and access all its merchants.

Networks matter to link health because they own the tracking hop: their domains route your clicks, their error pages signal dead programs, their click IDs prove attribution. When a merchant changes networks, every published link on the old network dies — the single most damaging routine event in affiliate publishing.