Most publishers don't know what percentage of their affiliate links are actually earning them commission. We built a free tool that shows you in minutes — no account needed.
Most publishers have hundreds, sometimes thousands, of outbound retailer links scattered across their sites. Some have proper affiliate tracking. Some don't. Some had tracking that worked six months ago but doesn't anymore because the retailer moved networks.
The problem is nobody has time to check. Finding out whether your links are actually earning means inspecting every outbound link on a page, checking whether it has tracking, whether that tracking is still valid, and whether the retailer has moved networks since the link was created. Then repeating that across hundreds of articles.
That's why we built a free affiliate link audit tool.
What the audit shows you
Give it a URL and it scans your pages for outbound retailer links. It then breaks down what it finds into three categories:
Links earning you full commission — these go through your own direct network accounts. You keep 100% of the commission. This is what you want to see.
Links going through a third party — platforms like Skimlinks typically take around 25% of every commission. If your links are being routed through a third party, you're paying for access to retailers that are almost certainly available on networks you could join for free.
Links with no tracking at all — these are clicks to retailers where you earn nothing. Your readers are clicking through, potentially buying, and you're not getting paid for any of it.
That three-way split is something most publishers have never seen. It's easy to assume most of your links are working. The numbers often tell a different story.
What we're finding
We've been running audits across a range of publisher sites and the results have been eye-opening. One site we scanned had every single affiliate link going through Skimlinks. Not a single direct network relationship on the page. That's 25% of every commission going to a middleman for access to retailers that are freely available on networks anyone can join.
That's not unusual. Many publishers set up Skimlinks or a similar platform early on because it's easy, and then never revisit it. Meanwhile, they've signed up to Awin, CJ, or Impact for other reasons — but their editorial content is still routing everything through the third party.
How to run your own audit
The tool is free, takes a couple of minutes, and doesn't require an account. You get a shareable link to your results so you can send them to your team or come back to them later.
We scan up to five pages per domain, which is usually enough to get a representative picture of how your affiliate links are set up.
What you can do with the results
If the audit shows that most of your links are going through your own accounts with proper tracking, you're in good shape, but there's still room for improvement, especially when it comes to ensuring the correct network wrapper is being used.
If it shows a significant percentage going through a third party or with no tracking at all, you've got options. You can manually update your links to use your own network accounts. You can install Squirrel Links, which does that automatically across your entire site with a single line of code. Or you can simply use the results as a starting point for a conversation with your affiliate team about where the gaps are.
Either way, the first step is knowing. Most publishers don't.