Guides
Affiliate link health, explained
Everything about why affiliate links stop earning and how to fix them — written from the data of a production link-validation engine, not recycled blog posts.
Why Are My Affiliate Links Not Working? The 8 Real Causes
Affiliate links stop paying for 8 specific reasons — closed programs, dead product pages, stripped tracking parameters, and more. How to diagnose and fix each one.
Affiliate Link Rot: What It Is and How Much It Costs You
Affiliate link rot is the gradual silent failure of published affiliate links — closed programs, dead products, homepage redirects. What it costs and how to stop it.
How to Tell If an Affiliate Program Closed (Network by Network)
Each affiliate network shows program closure differently: Awin closed-merchant pages, Impact "offer no longer available", CJ "advertiser not found". Every signal, network by network.
How to Test If Your Affiliate Tracking Actually Works
A working affiliate link is one that attributes. How to verify tracking end-to-end: click IDs in the final URL, cookie checks, dashboard confirmation, and common failure points.
How to Find Broken Affiliate Links in Your YouTube Videos
Old YouTube videos keep earning views while their description links quietly die. How to audit every affiliate link across your entire channel — manually and automatically.
The Affiliate Link Audit Checklist (2026)
A complete 12-step checklist for auditing every affiliate link you’ve published: inventory, validation, tracking verification, triage, and ongoing monitoring.
Link Rot Statistics: How Fast the Web (and Your Affiliate Revenue) Decays
The key link rot statistics: 38% of 2013's webpages are gone (Pew Research), a quarter of news deep links rot, and affiliate links decay faster than average. Sources included.
Network directory
Network-specific link anatomy and failure modes:
Check every affiliate link you've ever published
Reading about broken links is step one. Finding yours is step two. Afterlink scans your entire YouTube channel or website, follows every redirect chain, and alerts you the day a link breaks.
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