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, and how to detect each one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How to detect it: check the final destination's status and whether it still resolves to the specific product, not a fallback page.
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.
How to detect it: inspect the final URL's parameters and confirm your tracking identifiers survived every redirect.
5. The merchant changed terms or domains
Rebrands, domain migrations, and program moves quietly reroute links. Sometimes they redirect correctly; often they do not.
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.
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.
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.