The creator's affiliate checklist: 7 things to audit quarterly.

Most creators check their affiliate dashboard and see "earnings look steady." They assume the links are fine. Earnings look steady because your best links are doing the heavy lifting; the broken ones just fell out of the ranking and stopped contributing. Everything broken is invisible by definition. And bigger than most creators estimate (see the actual math).

Once a quarter, run this audit on your active affiliate links. Allow 30 minutes for your top 20.

1. The 404 / 500 sweep

Open each URL. Does the page load? If not, that's the easy kind of broken. Fix or replace.

Generic link checkers can do this part for you. Most will miss the rest of this list.

2. Sold-out product check

Page loads, HTTP 200, product page looks normal. Now read it. Is there a "Buy now" button, or is it "Currently unavailable" / "Out of stock" / "Discontinued"? A 200 OK on a sold-out product is traffic you're still sending but no longer earning on.

3. Program discontinuation check

Visit the affiliate program's dashboard. Is it still active? Some programs shut down quietly. Especially smaller SaaS affiliate schemes. If the program is gone, the URL still works, but you're no longer paid for conversions.

4. Affiliate tag sanity check

Click your own URL. Let all redirects resolve. Open the final URL in the address bar. Is your affiliate tag still there, formatted the way the network expects? Some networks update their URL schema and old formats silently stop crediting.

5. Redirect chain check

Use a tool like curl -LvI (or httpie's --follow) to see every hop. If a redirect hop strips query parameters, your tag disappears before the final destination. Common culprit: HTTPS upgrades, subdomain normalizations, and some CDN configs.

6. CTR vs EPC delta check

In your dashboard, look at earnings per click (EPC) over time. Did one link's EPC drop 70% three months ago with no corresponding drop in CTR? That's a silent break. Dig into that link.

7. Managed URL hygiene

If you use managed URLs, verify each points to the intended destination. Set monitoring on each so you don't need to run this audit manually next quarter.

Or: automate six of the seven

Manually doing this on 20 links once a quarter takes 30 minutes. On 100 links it's a day of work. Affiliyo runs steps 1-6 automatically. HTTP checks 3× a day, AI reads daily, transition alerts when something flips from healthy to broken. You still want to do step 7 yourself, because it's a sanity check on your own habits. Once the audit finds broken links, the next move is usually reviving old affiliate content. That's where the fixes pay back fastest.