Affiliate links do not break at random. There is always a specific cause, and each cause has a detectable signature. If you understand why links break, you can monitor for the exact signal that predicts lost revenue — and catch it automatically instead of discovering it in next month's payout. Here are the most common reasons affiliate links break, what each one looks like from the outside, and how to detect it.
How often do links actually break?
Often enough that "I'll check when something looks wrong" is not a strategy. A 2024 Pew Research Center analysis of nearly a million web pages found that 25% of all pages collected between 2013 and 2023 were no longer accessible by October 2023 — including 38% of pages that existed in 2013, and 8% of pages created in 2023 that had already decayed within a year. The same study found that 23% of news pages contained at least one broken link.
Affiliate links decay faster than that baseline, for three reasons the study does not measure:
- They point at commercial pages — products, offers, and campaigns that are
designed to be retired.
- They pass through extra infrastructure — a cloaker, a network tracker, a
merchant redirect — and every hop is an independent thing that can fail.
- They can fail without breaking. An ordinary link is either alive or dead.
An affiliate link can return a perfect 200 OK, render a real product page, and still earn nothing because your tag fell off along the way.
That last mode is the expensive one, and it is why "the page still loads" tells you almost nothing. Below are the five failure modes, in roughly the order they show up in practice.
1. The program ended or dropped you
Affiliate programs close, restructure, or remove partners regularly. When that happens, your deep link usually redirects to a generic homepage with your tag stripped — the page loads fine, but the commission is gone. Merchants prefer this to a hard error, because a homepage still converts *for them*. It just does not convert for you.
This is also what an account-level problem looks like from the outside. If a network suspends you, disables a site, or flags a compliance issue, you rarely get a broken page. You get a working page with no attribution, applied across every link at once — which is why a sudden portfolio-wide change is a stronger signal than any single link.
How to detect it: follow the redirect chain and compare the final URL to what you expect. A deep link that now lands on a bare homepage, or loses its affiliate parameter, is the tell. Watch for the pattern across many links at once: one link landing on a homepage is a retired product, and every link landing on a homepage is an account problem.
2. A redirect in the chain failed
Most affiliate links pass through one or more redirects — a cloaker, the network's tracker, then the merchant. If any hop returns an error or drops a parameter, the click is wasted even though the first URL looked fine.
The specific failures worth naming:
- A dead hop. Hop two returns
404or500. The chain stops there and the
reader sees an error page.
- A redirect loop. Two hops point at each other, or a tracker bounces back
to a URL it has already served. Browsers give up after a threshold; so does the click.
- A chain that never ends. Some misconfigured trackers redirect
indefinitely. This times out rather than erroring, so anything checking only for HTTP error codes will miss it.
- A hop that answers slowly. A tracker that takes eight seconds does not
technically fail, but a meaningful share of readers leave before it resolves.
How to detect it: evaluate the entire redirect chain, not just the first response. A 200 OK on hop one means nothing if hop three 404s. Cap the number of hops you will follow and treat exceeding that cap as a failure in its own right, not as an inconclusive result.
3. The product page is gone
Merchants retire SKUs, merge product pages, and take listings down. The deep link then returns a 404/410 or bounces to a search or category page that converts far worse.
The soft failures matter more than the hard ones here. A 404 is honest and easy to catch. What actually costs money is the merchant who redirects a retired product to a search results page for its name, or to the category it used to sit in. Both return 200. Both look healthy to any checker that only reads status codes. Neither converts anywhere near the product page you linked to, and on a marketplace the search page may well sell a competitor's item.
How to detect it: check the final destination's status *and* whether it still resolves to the specific product rather than a fallback page. A final URL containing a search path or query, or one that has lost the product identifier it started with, deserves the same alert as an outright 404.
4. The affiliate tag was stripped or edited
A truncated URL, a plugin conflict, or a manual edit can remove your tag, subid, or tracking parameter. The link works — for the merchant — but your attribution is gone.
Where the tag disappears tells you who is responsible:
- Missing at hop 0 — the link was published wrong. A copy-paste that clipped
the query string, a template that URL-encoded the parameter, an editor who "tidied" the URL.
- Dropped mid-chain, restored at the end — usually harmless. Some networks
deliberately hand attribution off between hops.
- Present at hop 0, absent at the final URL — the real failure. Something in
the chain is discarding your parameter and the click will not be credited.
The economics make this urgent rather than merely annoying. On Amazon, the Associates Program Operating Agreement runs on a 24-hour cookie window, so attribution generally applies only to purchases made within a day of the click. An untagged click is not a delayed commission — it is a commission that never existed.
How to detect it: inspect the final URL's parameters and confirm your tracking identifiers survived every redirect. Compare against what the link carried when you published it, not against a guess.
5. The merchant changed terms or domains
Rebrands, domain migrations, and program moves quietly reroute links. Sometimes they redirect correctly; often they do not, and the redirect that worked at launch degrades months later when the merchant retires the mapping.
Two variants are worth separating. In a clean migration, the old domain 308s to the new one, your parameters survive, and nothing needs fixing — but you still want to know, because your links now depend on a redirect that someone else maintains. In a lossy migration, the old domain redirects to the new homepage rather than the equivalent page, and every deep link you published collapses into a single generic destination.
How to detect it: watch for changes in the final destination over time, so a domain move surfaces as an alert rather than a slow bleed. The signal is not "this link is broken" but "this link now lands somewhere different than it did last week."
How do you tell these apart from one check?
Three observations separate every case above: the final HTTP status, the final URL, and whether your affiliate parameters survived to it.
| What you observe | Most likely cause |
|---|---|
404 / 410 at the final URL | Product page gone (3) |
200, final URL is the merchant's homepage | Program ended or dropped you (1) |
200, final URL is a search or category page | Product retired, soft-failed (3) |
200, correct product, tag missing | Tag stripped in the chain (4) |
200, correct product, different domain than before | Merchant migration (5) |
| Timeout, loop, or hop limit exceeded | Redirect chain failure (2) |
| Every link changed at once | Account-level issue (1) |
You can gather all three by hand for a single link — paste it into our free affiliate link checker and it will show you the full redirect chain, the status at each hop, and where a tag went missing, with no signup. The hard part is not checking one link. It is checking all of them, repeatedly, forever.
Catching all of this automatically
Every failure above shares one requirement to detect it: you have to follow the link the way a real click does and inspect where it truly lands — on a schedule, forever. That is what Affilert does. It re-checks every link across every network, follows each redirect to the real destination, and alerts you the moment the signature of a broken link appears — an unexpected homepage, a missing tag, a dead product, a failed hop.
To go deeper on the checks themselves, read how healthchecks work, and when you do find a break, use our fixing broken links checklist. For the detection side — how to actually surface these failures — see how to find broken affiliate links, and if Amazon is a big part of your mix, its failure modes get their own treatment in the Amazon Associates link-checker guide.
Frequently asked questions
Why does a link that returns 200 still count as broken?
Because 200 describes the merchant's page, not your commission. A retired product that redirects to a search page returns 200. A program that dropped you and sends every deep link to its homepage returns 200. A chain that silently discards your tag parameter returns 200. In all three cases the reader sees a working page and you earn nothing, which is why the useful test is "did this land on the right page with my tag attached" rather than "did this load."
How often should I re-check links to catch these failures?
Match the cadence to what the link is worth. Your top earning pages justify a daily check; the long tail is fine weekly. Time-boxed links are the exception that deserves the tightest schedule — a seasonal or launch link that breaks is worthless by the time a weekly sweep finds it. The complete affiliate link monitoring guide works through the cadence question in detail.
Can I prevent links from breaking rather than just detecting it?
Only partly. Publishing links correctly and keeping a canonical source for each one removes the self-inflicted cases in category 4. Everything else — programs ending, products retiring, merchants migrating — is a decision someone else makes without telling you. Detection is the lever you actually control, so the goal is shrinking the gap between the break and your knowing about it.
Should affiliate links be marked with rel="sponsored"?
Yes. Google asks publishers to qualify affiliate links with `rel="sponsored"`. It has no bearing on whether a link breaks, but a link audit is the natural moment to confirm the attribute is in place, since you are already touching every affiliate link on the page.
Name the cause, then automate the catch
Links break for a handful of concrete, recognizable reasons. Once you can name them, you can monitor for their exact signals — and the difference between a proactive alert and a mystery revenue dip is simply whether something is watching every link, all the time.