Affiliate Links on Medium (and Hosted Blog Platforms)
Hosted platforms like Medium allow affiliate links (with disclosure) but strip away the infrastructure self-hosted bloggers rely on: no redirect plugins, no site-wide search-and-replace, no crawl access to your own archive. Every affiliate link is pasted raw into posts you must maintain by hand — which makes an external audit tool the only practical way to keep a large archive healthy, and your own vanity redirects the only way to make old posts fixable in one place.
What you give up on hosted platforms
- ▸No redirect layer: raw network URLs go straight into posts, so fixing a dead program means editing every post individually.
- ▸No bulk tooling: finding every affiliate link across hundreds of posts is manual — or a job for a crawler.
- ▸Platform rules: Medium requires clear disclosure of affiliate links; violations risk distribution penalties, a link-health issue of its own.
The workaround architecture
Even on Medium you can use redirects you control: link to go.yourdomain.com/product (a $10/year domain plus any redirect service) instead of raw awin1.com URLs. Old posts then heal centrally when programs change. This is the single highest-leverage habit for hosted-platform affiliates.
For the archive you already have with raw links: your profile and publication pages are crawlable webpages — a site scan inventories every outbound link across your posts and flags the dead ones, turning an impossible manual audit into an edit list.
Frequently asked questions
Are affiliate links allowed on Medium?
Yes, with clear disclosure in the post. The platform's rules concern transparency, not the links themselves.
How do I audit years of Medium posts?
Scan your profile/publication URL with a crawler-based tool: every post is public HTML, so the links can be extracted and validated externally even though Medium gives you no internal tooling.
Other platforms
Check every affiliate link you've ever published
Wherever you publish, the links are the revenue layer — and they rot everywhere. Afterlink scans your entire YouTube channel or website, follows every redirect chain, and alerts you the day a link breaks.
Run a free scan