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Affiliate marketing in 2026: what the numbers show

We asked whether our affiliate links were worth keeping. Affiliate marketing in 2026 is not dead, but search, AI answers and Amazon all pay it less.

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[ 003 ]14 September 20267 min readupdated 15 September 2026
affiliatebusiness modelsmoneysearchaishort-form video

tl;dr

  • In Ahrefs' data, the top search result gets 58% fewer clicks when an AI Overview shows.
  • Across 973 online stores, AI assistants sent under 0.2% of traffic.
  • Since 14 April 2026, an Amazon affiliate link earns only on the same product variant it links to.
  • One affiliate's TikTok video reached 47,000 views and brought about 15 clicks and no sales.

why readFor anyone earning, or planning to earn, from affiliate links: where the clicks and the commission went in 2026.

To see where affiliate marketing stands in 2026, and whether it is dead, we looked for numbers someone had to stand behind: a click study, company results, a peer-reviewed dataset of online stores, Amazon's and Google's own policy pages, and affiliates' first-hand accounts.

The short answer is that affiliate marketing is not dead, but every old route to the sale pays less. Search sends fewer clicks, AI answers rarely send the visit, Amazon counts fewer purchases, and short videos keep viewers inside the app.

Search clicks: an AI Overview takes 58 of every 100

Ahrefs compared click rates on 300,000 keywords, half with an AI Overview and half without, using desktop Google Search Console data for December 2023 and December 2025.

58%fewer clicks, top result
68%searches with no click

On keywords with an AI Overview, the top-ranking page's click rate was 58% lower, up from 34.5% in Ahrefs' earlier study. Ahrefs puts it as Google now "keeps" 58 of every 100 clicks the top page could once earn.

SparkToro found that in the first four months of 2026, 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click, in Similarweb's desktop and mobile panel.

Public companies report the drop in their results. Future plc said its affiliate organic revenue fell 24% in the half year to May 2026, "reflecting lower website audiences due to disruption in the search ecosystem."

People Inc, the publisher formerly called Dotdash Meredith, had its Google Search traffic fall 40%, to 21% of its core sessions, in the second quarter of 2026, according to Investing.com's summary of its results.

Its second-quarter release put the fall in sessions down to "the growing prominence of Google AI Overviews on Google search results", and still reported affiliate commerce growth of 11%.

Search still sends clicks, but far fewer reach the page that explains a purchase. One large publisher lost Google traffic and still grew its affiliate sales.

AI answers: a citation rarely brings the visit

Kaiser and Schulze, writing in Marketing Science, analyzed 12 months of first-party Google Analytics data from 973 online stores with $20 billion of combined revenue.

973online stores
0.2%traffic from AI assistants

One year after ChatGPT's launch, traffic from AI assistants was under 0.2% of all traffic in that data, about 200 times smaller than Google's organic search.

What AI does cite is rarely an article. In Ahrefs' count of the 1,000 pages ChatGPT cited most in September 2025, blog articles were 1.9%, against 23.8% for homepages and landing pages.

Being named by an AI assistant is not the same as getting the visit. In these datasets, AI sends a small share of store traffic, and it cites front pages far more often than articles.

Amazon: a narrower sale, a small share

Amazon's summary of its Associates agreement changes, effective 14 April 2026, narrows which purchases a link earns on.

$400on $16,000 in sales
€284on €5,627 in sales

Under "Onsite Commission Scope", commission now counts only purchases of the same product variant as the linked page. Purchases by shoppers referred through any paid or boosted ad linking to Amazon are disqualified.

One publisher replied to the change that hundreds of Amazon links on their site drive about $16,000 in sales to earn around $400 in commission, about 2.5%.

A second site, selling products from €300 to €1,500 through search alone, earned €284.49 in commission on €5,627.16 of product revenue in about ten months, about 5%.

The programs that pay more can say no. One tool site was accepted by about three merchants and refused by at least a dozen, including Reverb, Creality and Home Depot, with reasons such as "irrelevant or not complimentary to our brand."

An Amazon link now earns on a narrower set of purchases, and these two sites kept a few percent of what they sent. Better-paying brand programs exist, and they choose who joins.

Short videos: views rarely become clicks

One affiliate posted about 60 faceless product videos on TikTok over four months. Most got 200 to 400 views, and one reached 47,000.

47,000views
15clicks
0sales

The poster estimated "maybe 15 clicks" from that video. Their first commission after four months was $8.47, for a coffee grinder.

Where the app has a shop, it sells far more than a link. One seller wrote in a comment on their own post that a link in their bio gets about 5 sales a day, which "nowhere near compares" to a TikTok Shop button on a video that gets 50 to 100.

Those in-app shops are not open everywhere. YouTube's Shopping affiliate program lists 14 eligible countries, including the United States, and Canada is not one of them.

The feed keeps viewers inside the app. For one seller the in-app shop sold ten to twenty times what a bio link did, and where there is no shop, big views can send almost no one.

AI-made pages: volume gets dropped from Google

Google's spam policies, last updated 28 August 2026, name "using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users" as scaled content abuse.

One operator generated about 800 pages from a template and a database in a business software niche. By month four, roughly 60% had been pulled from Google's index. In the poster's read of this one experiment, the survivors had unique data, links from hand-written pages, and search demand not already crowded.

Making pages is cheap for everyone now, and Google names mass-produced pages as spam. In this case most of them were gone within four months.

Conclusion: affiliate marketing is not dead in 2026, the old routes pay less

Each finding has a problem at its center, and none of them has a settled answer yet.

  • AI answers take clicks from the top search result. challenge In Ahrefs' data the top result gets 58% fewer clicks when an AI Overview shows, and 68% of US Google searches in early 2026 ended with no click.
  • AI assistants cite pages but rarely send the visit. challenge Across 973 online stores AI assistants sent under 0.2% of traffic, and blog articles were 1.9% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages.
  • Affiliate pays a small share of someone else's sale. challenge Amazon now pays only on the variant linked, two sites kept about 2.5% and 5% of the sales they sent, and one small site was refused by at least a dozen brand programs.
  • Views do not pay on their own. challenge A 47,000-view video brought about 15 clicks and no sales, and YouTube's Shopping affiliate program leaves Canada out.
  • Pages made at volume get dropped from Google. challenge Google's spam policy names AI-generated pages that add no value, and one operator lost about 60% of 800 generated pages by month four.

These are one keyword study, one clickstream panel, two companies' results, one academic dataset of online stores, Amazon's and Google's own pages, and single first-hand accounts. They show where each problem is, not how big it is for a given site or product.

The click is moving. Search engines now answer on the results page, and both publishers above tie their losses to that. It pushes the work toward being the place a buyer acts, since ChatGPT's citations went to front pages far more than to articles. For anyone with affiliate links, a guide ranking in the same spot now gets fewer visits. And it opens a door: People Inc lost Google traffic and still grew affiliate commerce, so the sale is still there for whoever reaches the buyer another way.

None of this is a reason to stay out. A problem without an answer yet is not a problem without an answer. Affiliate links are a vehicle, and a new tool or a changed rule can open a route that these numbers do not show yet.

Affiliate marketing still pays, but not through the routes that paid in 2020. Name the problem first, then look for the way around it.

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Sources

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