How to Find Broken Affiliate Links (Before They Cost You Money)

Affiliate links fail in two different ways, and only one of them looks like a failure. That is the whole problem. A link checker that reads status codes will find the first kind on the first pass and will never, on any pass, find the second.

This is how to find both, by hand and then without your attention.

The Two Types of Broken Affiliate Links

Type one: the link is dead. The product was discontinued, the merchant restructured their catalog, the deal page expired, the shop closed. The URL returns a 404, or it times out, or it redirects to a category page that has nothing to do with what you recommended. A reader clicks and gets nothing. You earn nothing, and at least you can see why.

Type two: the link works and pays nobody. This is the expensive one. The reader clicks, the page loads, the product is right there, they buy it. Somewhere along the redirect chain your tracking tag was dropped, so the sale is credited to no one. The page returns 200. The link looks perfect in a browser. Your analytics show the outbound click. The only trace is a commission report that is quietly smaller than the traffic behind it.

A tag disappears for ordinary reasons. A merchant relists a product under a different seller. A network changes its URL format. A shortener in the middle strips query parameters. A site adds a redirect that rebuilds the URL and drops everything after the question mark. None of these events notify you, and none of them break anything a status code can see.

There is also a third case that is not a failure at all, and mistaking it for one wastes more time than the real problems: networks that do not carry the tag in the URL. With Awin, CJ and similar networks the tracking is set in a cookie during the redirect, so the final merchant URL is supposed to look clean. If your checker flags those as stripped, it is not finding a problem, it is manufacturing one.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

The instinct is to treat this as maintenance, somewhere below fixing typos. It is closer to a leak in the part of the business that pays for everything else.

It hits the traffic you already earned. A broken affiliate link is not a missed opportunity in some future audience. It is a click that already happened, from a reader you already acquired, on a page that is already ranking. You paid for that visitor in writing time, in SEO work, or in ad spend. The failure comes after all of it.

Your best pages are the most exposed. The posts that earn the most are the ones that have been up the longest and rank the highest. They also have had the most time for their destinations to move, sell out or disappear. Breakage concentrates exactly where the revenue is.

Nobody tells you. A reader who lands on a dead product page does not email you about it. A reader who buys through an untagged link has a perfect experience and no idea anything is wrong. There is no complaint, no error, no alert. The only signal is a number going down slowly enough to be blamed on the season.

The clock runs the whole time. A dead link found in March that broke in November cost you four months of clicks on that page. Nothing about the loss is recoverable retroactively.

How to Check for Stripped Affiliate Tags

Doing this by hand is worth understanding even if you end up automating it, because it tells you what an automated check has to prove.

1. Open the link the way a reader does. Not by copying the URL out of your CMS, and not while logged into the merchant. Use a private window, click it from the published page, and let every redirect run. 2. Read the final URL, not the first one. The address you land on is what matters. Everything before it was just the trip. 3. Ask what your network puts in that URL. For Amazon the tag lives there: look for your tag parameter on a real product page. If the page loads and your tag is gone, that click pays nobody. If a different tag is there, it is usually a marketplace switch, which is a different problem with the same effect on you. 4. For cookie-based networks, check the trip instead of the destination. With Awin, CJ and similar, a clean final URL is the expected outcome. What you want to confirm is that the redirect actually reached the merchant, rather than stopping at an error page or a generic homepage. 5. Watch for the silent substitutions. A link that ends on the merchant homepage instead of the product, an out of stock page that still returns 200, a shortener in the middle that rewrote the URL. All three look healthy to a status check and all three earn nothing. 6. Write down the page, not just the link. The fix happens on your post. A list of broken destinations with no source pages is a research project, not a task list.

Do this for ten links and the method is obvious. Do it for four hundred and you will not do it twice, which is the real reason most affiliate sites are full of links nobody has verified since publication.

Automating the Process

The manual method fails on scale and on repetition. Scale is obvious. Repetition is the part that matters more: the check is only true on the day you run it, because the breakage keeps arriving from other people's sites on their schedule, not yours.

What an automated check has to do to be worth trusting:

• Follow every redirect to the end, and judge the destination rather than the first hop.
• Know how each network tracks. A checker that treats a clean URL as a red flag regardless of network will flag every Awin and CJ link you own and be wrong every time.
• Separate confirmed failures from uncertain ones. A single timeout is not a dead link. If everything lands in one list, you stop reading the list.
• Name the page the link sits on, so fixing is editing rather than searching.
• Run again without being asked. A one-time audit is a snapshot of a moving target.

This is what Verflink's affiliate link checker is built for. It crawls your public pages, follows each affiliate link through its redirect chain, and reports three distinct outcomes rather than one: broken destinations, tags that were stripped or changed where the tag is supposed to be in the URL, and cookie-based network links that arrived correctly and should be left alone. The free scan needs nothing but your URL, no account and no snippet to install, and a subscription repeats the whole crawl monthly and emails you the day a link that used to pay stops paying.

Two limits worth stating plainly. It is best effort: some merchants block automated requests or answer differently to a crawler, so a scan can miss things. And it reads your public pages, so it sees what a logged out reader sees.

A Quick Checklist

Run this after every publishing sprint, and on a schedule in between.

• Every affiliate link followed to its final URL, not just its first response.
• Amazon links checked for your tag on a real product page, not just for a page that loads.
• Awin, CJ and other cookie-based links confirmed to reach the merchant, and not flagged for looking clean.
• Redirect chains inspected for shorteners or hops that rewrite the URL and drop parameters.
• Destinations that return 200 but show out of stock, unavailable or a homepage treated as failures, because they earn like failures.
• Every finding tied to the page it lives on.
• Confirmed breakage kept separate from uncertain cases, so the urgent list stays short enough to act on.
• The whole thing repeated monthly, because the next broken link is already on its way.

If you would rather see the list for your own site than build the process, the free scan takes about a minute. See also what link rot is, and how broken links kill ecommerce conversions for the revenue side of the same problem.