How Affilert compares
Publishers usually reach for a broken-link crawler, a WordPress link plugin, or an affiliate analytics tool. Each solves a real problem — but none of them continuously verify that your affiliate links still earn. Here is where Affilert fits, and where it is different.
Feature comparison
| Capability | Affilert | Broken-link crawlers | WordPress link plugins | Affiliate analytics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Purpose-built for affiliate links | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Continuous scheduled monitoring | Yes | Partial or limited | Partial or limited | No |
| Follows the full redirect chain | Yes | Partial or limited | No | No |
| Detects stripped / missing tracking tags | Yes | No | No | Partial or limited |
| Works across every network in one place | Yes | Partial or limited | No | Partial or limited |
| Not tied to a single CMS | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Instant alerts on breakage (email / webhook) | Yes | No | Partial or limited | No |
Yes Partial / limited NoCategory comparison based on the typical design focus of each tool type; individual products vary.
The alternatives, and where they stop
Broken-link crawlers & SEO auditors
Site crawlers and SEO audit tools are excellent at finding site-wide 404s. But they are built for on-page SEO, not affiliate revenue: they often stop at the first response instead of following the whole redirect chain, and a link that resolves to a generic homepage with your tag stripped looks perfectly healthy to them. They also run when you launch a crawl — not continuously.
WordPress link-management plugins
Plugins such as link cloakers and managers are great for organizing, cloaking, and inserting links inside a single WordPress site. Their limits show up at scale: they are tied to one CMS, they focus on managing links rather than continuously verifying the live destination, and they cannot give you one cross-site, cross-network view of what is broken right now. See our guide on link management for multi-site publishers.
Affiliate analytics platforms
Analytics and attribution tools help you understand which links earn and where revenue comes from. That is a different job from health monitoring: they are built to measure performance, not to proactively alert you the moment a link stops resolving or loses its tag. Affilert complements analytics by watching for the breakage that analytics only reveals after the money is already lost.
What makes Affilert unique
It runs continuously, not on demand
Most tools check when you click a button. Affilert re-checks every link on a schedule, around the clock, so breakage reaches you as an alert instead of a surprise in your payout report.
It understands affiliate redirects
A generic crawler sees a 200 OK and calls a link healthy. Affilert follows the full redirect chain to the real destination and checks that your tracking tag survived — the failures that actually cost commissions.
It covers every network at once
Amazon Associates, CJ, Impact, ShareASale and the rest live in one dashboard and one alert stream — not a separate login and spreadsheet per program.
It isn't locked to one CMS
WordPress plugins only see one WordPress site. Affilert imports links from any site, sheet, or feed, so multi-site and headless publishers get a single source of truth.
See it on your own links
Import your affiliate links and let Affilert monitor them across every network. No card required.