Broken affiliate links cost you twice: the click earns nothing, and the reader who lands on a dead page stops trusting your recommendations. Find them with a link checker like Broken Link Checker or Ahrefs, fix them by updating the URL or swapping in a comparable program, and re-check every 90 days.
I audited a client’s resources page in the spring of 2023. Forty-seven affiliate links on the page. Eleven of them were dead. One pointed to a product that got discontinued two years earlier. Three went to a program that closed. The rest were casualties of a merchant redesigning their site and not bothering to redirect anything.
That page got roughly 1,900 visits a month. She had no idea. And she’d been wondering for months why her commissions kept sliding while her traffic held steady.
This happens to almost everyone who has been publishing affiliate content for more than a year or two. You write the post, the link works, you move on. Nobody sends you an email when a merchant quietly kills their program.
Why broken affiliate links cost you money
The obvious cost is the commission you don’t earn. Someone reads your review, decides to buy, clicks, and gets a 404. That sale doesn’t go to a competitor. It doesn’t happen at all, because most people don’t go hunting for the product after a dead link kills their momentum.
The second cost is slower and worse. A reader who hits two broken links on your site starts treating your recommendations as stale. They stop clicking. If your affiliate income depends on people believing you’ve used and vetted the things you link to, a dead link says the opposite.
Google notices too. Broken outbound links on a page signal neglect, and pages full of them tend to lose ground over time. I’ve seen this play out on older review posts that ranked well for years and then drifted down. Nothing dramatic happened. The content aged, the links rotted, and the page stopped looking maintained.
There’s also the tracking problem. Some links don’t 404. They resolve to a live page with your affiliate ID stripped out, which is worse than a dead link because you can’t see it. The click works, the sale happens, and you get nothing. If you don’t know how affiliate tracking works, these are easy to miss for months.
Link rot is one of the quiet ways affiliate income leaks out of a business. I wrote about several others in Affiliate Marketing Mistakes That Kill Your Commissions. Most of them share the same pattern: small problems nobody checks for until the numbers drop.
How to find broken affiliate links on your site
Start with a crawler. Screaming Frog will scan up to 500 URLs on the free version, which covers most affiliate sites, and it flags every 404 and 301 chain in your outbound links. Run it, sort by status code, and export the list.
If you’re on WordPress, the Broken Link Checker plugin monitors continuously and emails you when something breaks. The cloud version costs about $10 a month and doesn’t hammer your server the way the old local version did. Dr. Link Check is a solid alternative if you want to scan without installing anything.
Google Search Console helps with a different angle. Open the Pages report and look at what Google can’t reach. It won’t catch outbound affiliate links, but it catches your own broken internal links and any cloaked redirect URLs that stopped resolving.
Then check the ones no crawler catches. Take your top 10 earning pages, click every affiliate link, and confirm two things: the page loads, and your affiliate ID is still in the final URL after all the redirects. This takes twenty minutes and it’s the only way to catch the silent failures. Tracking your links properly makes this much faster, because you can compare click counts against commissions and spot the gaps.
One more source worth checking: your affiliate network dashboards. If a program has generated zero clicks for 60 days on a page that still gets traffic, something upstream is broken.
Resources pages hold more affiliate links than anything else on your site, which makes them the highest-value thing to audit first. My free guide The Ultimate Guide To Creating A Resources Page covers how I built one that earns over $10,000 a month, including how I keep the links current.
What causes affiliate links to break
Merchants redesign their sites. This causes more dead affiliate links than anything else. A company moves from /products/blue-widget to /shop/widgets/blue and sets up redirects for their own internal links while forgetting the thousands of affiliate URLs pointing at the old structure.
Programs shut down. The merchant goes under, gets acquired, or decides affiliate marketing isn’t worth the overhead. Sometimes you get an email. Often you don’t, especially if the program ran through a network and the merchant left quietly.
Products get discontinued. The program is fine, the merchant is fine, the specific product you built a 2,400-word review around no longer exists. The link redirects to a category page, which converts at a fraction of the rate.
Your account gets deactivated. Amazon Associates closes accounts that go 180 days without a single sale. Other networks purge inactive affiliates on their own schedules. Your links stay live and your ID stops earning.
Cloaking plugins break. If you use Pretty Links or ThirstyAffiliates, your visible URL is yoursite.com/go/product and the real destination lives in a database table. A botched plugin update, a database migration, or a theme conflict can wipe those redirects and every cloaked link on your site dies at once. Worth reading whether you should cloak your affiliate links before you build your whole site on that setup.
Networks change. A merchant moves from ShareASale to Impact and the old tracking domain stops resolving. Your links point at infrastructure that no longer exists.
A program closing is the hardest cause to recover from, because you’re not fixing a URL, you’re replacing an income stream. I walked through the full recovery process in What to Do When an Affiliate Program Shuts Down, including how to find a comparable offer fast.
How to fix a broken affiliate link
Match the fix to the cause. Four situations cover almost everything.
If the merchant moved the page, grab the new URL, run it through your affiliate link generator, and replace it. Five minutes. Check whether the merchant switched networks while you’re in there, because the link format may have changed even if the destination looks the same.
If the product got discontinued, look at what replaced it. Most companies release a successor. Point the link there and update the two or three sentences in your post that describe the old model’s specs. If nothing replaced it, the section needs rewriting rather than relinking, and pretending otherwise wastes the traffic that page still gets.
If the program closed, find a comparable offer in the same category and swap it in. Don’t reach for the highest commission you can find. Pick something you’d recommend to a friend, because the post already carries your endorsement and readers will hold you to it. My guide on choosing an affiliate offer worth promoting covers the criteria I use.
If your cloaking plugin broke, restore from backup before you rebuild anything by hand. If no backup exists, export whatever the plugin still has, rebuild the missing redirects, and then test a sample of 10 links across different posts rather than assuming the rest worked.
Do this on every fix: set up a 301 redirect from any of your own URLs that changed, so old shares and backlinks still land somewhere useful.
Swapping a program often means the review itself needs work, not the link. If the post compared three tools and one of them no longer exists, the comparison is broken even with a working URL. Rewriting the review properly is worth the hour. Review Post Pro handles the rewrite in a fraction of the time if you’re updating several posts at once.
How often should you check your affiliate links
Every 90 days for your full site. Monthly for your top 10 earning pages. That schedule has caught almost every problem before it cost me a full quarter of commissions.
Set the crawler to run automatically and route the alerts to a folder you check weekly, not to your main inbox where they’ll get buried. The Broken Link Checker cloud version does this well. So does Ahrefs Site Audit if you already pay for it.
Build a link check into the routine you already have. Any time you update a post for freshness, click every affiliate link in it before you hit publish. Any time you finish a promotion, verify the links in the posts you drove traffic to. I keep this step on my promotion checklist so it happens without me remembering.
Cloak your links if you haven’t. When your links run through yoursite.com/go/product, a program change means editing one redirect instead of hunting through 40 posts. This is the single biggest time-saver in link maintenance, and it pays for itself the first time a merchant changes their URL structure.
Keep a simple spreadsheet: program name, network, the pages where you link to it, and the date you last verified it. When a program emails you about a change, you know in ten seconds which posts to update. This also catches the reverse problem, where you’re linking to a program that’s fine but paying half what a competitor offers, which is a good moment to revisit your roundup posts too.
Watch for merchant emails about site migrations. Those announcements read like housekeeping notices, and they’re the earliest warning you’ll get that your links are about to break.
If a closed program leaves you needing a replacement, the hardest part is getting approved by the new one quickly. My free Affiliate Marketing QuickStart Guide includes the copy-and-paste application emails I use to get accepted into programs, plus the criteria I check before applying.
Audit your affiliate links this week
Three steps. Do them in this order.
First, run Screaming Frog or Broken Link Checker across your whole site and export every 404. That gives you the list of hard breaks.
Second, open your top 10 earning pages and manually click every affiliate link, watching the final URL to confirm your ID survived the redirect chain. This catches the silent failures the crawler can’t see.
Third, put a recurring 90-day reminder on your calendar and cloak any links you haven’t cloaked yet, so the next round takes twenty minutes instead of an afternoon.
The fix itself is rarely the hard part. Most broken affiliate links take under five minutes each once you know they exist. The money you lose comes from the eleven months they sat there while you assumed they worked. While you’re auditing, check that your affiliate disclosures are still in place on those older posts, and confirm the pages themselves are holding up against Google’s core updates. And if a resources page is where most of your links live, start there. A well-maintained resources page earns for years. A neglected one earns nothing while looking identical.
