How affiliate links silently die. And how to notice before it costs you.

Affiliate income rarely stops on a Tuesday. It drips away. 3% this month, another 4% next. Until six months later you notice the review video that was your biggest earner now makes nothing. No alert, no email, no dashboard warning. Just a slow quiet leak. And it adds up faster than most creators expect (see the actual math).

The reason is that a link can fail in more ways than "the page is gone." Most of those ways return a perfectly normal 200 OK to whatever's checking them. Here are the four most common causes.

The four ways a link dies

1. The product sells out

The most common failure, especially on Amazon. The product page still loads. It's not a 404. But at the top: "Currently unavailable." Your audience clicks, sees no buy button, and leaves. No commission, because there's no purchase to attribute. Sneakier still is the variant-level case. when the specific color, size, or storage you linked to is permanently sold out while the parent product page renders fine.

2. The affiliate program is discontinued

SaaS tools pivot. A company acquires a competitor and migrates affiliate payouts to a different network. The URL you're using still resolves, but it no longer goes through the tag. You keep sending traffic, they keep taking the revenue. No alert is sent.

3. The destination domain itself changes

Brands rebrand. Products get folded into parent sites. A redirect chain gets set up that strips query parameters. Including your affiliate tag. Your URL returns a 200, but the landing page silently routes buyers to the new domain without crediting you.

4. The affiliate tag quietly breaks

An affiliate network updates the schema of their URLs. Your old URL still works, but the tag format is out of date, and their system stops crediting it. You'll only notice when you export a year of earnings and realize the gap.

Why no one catches these

Three reasons, stacked:

• Affiliate networks are paid to route clicks. They have no incentive to tell you when a destination stops converting.
• Creators don't monitor URLs after posting. You wrote the description six months ago; there's no reason to re-check it today.
• Generic uptime tools give 200 OK for all four of the failures above. You need something that reads the destination, not just pings it.

The audit creators never do (but should)

Once a quarter, for each active affiliate link, ask:

• Does the product page still show "add to cart"?
• Is the affiliate tag still in the final URL after all redirects?
• Does the brand still operate that program (or have they moved)?
• Has the destination domain changed?

Doing this manually for 10 links is annoying. For 100 links, impossible.

Or: have something watch for you

This is what Affiliyo does. Every link you monitor gets an HTTP check three times a day, plus a full AI read of the destination page that catches the four cases above. When a link flips from healthy to broken, you get an email. Not on every check, just on the transition. Free plan includes 10 monitored links forever. For creators sitting on a back catalog of evergreen content, also worth reading: reviving old affiliate content.