The concept
Affiliate link rot is what happens to content after you stop looking at it. The post keeps ranking, the video keeps getting recommended, the link-in-bio page keeps getting tapped — and somewhere in the chain between the click and the checkout, the money stopped arriving. Nothing on your dashboard changes when this happens.
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Four ways links rot
A 404 is the polite version — it announces itself. The other three are silent, which is why they survive for years in content nobody re-reads.
Product discontinued, domain expired, merchant shut down. The only failure mode a normal checker catches.
A shortener retired, a cloaked link lost its mapping, a chain now ends on a homepage instead of a product. The first hop still answers.
The link resolves perfectly and attributes to nobody. Technically flawless, commercially worthless.
A campaign landing page that still returns 200 long after the campaign closed. Loads fine. Converts at zero.
You check a link the day you publish it. The rot arrives in year two, when your attention is somewhere else entirely.
Page views hold steady while earnings slide, so it reads as a conversion problem. You optimise copy that was never the issue.
The pattern
It's tempting to imagine slow, even decay. In practice link rot is event-driven: a migration rewrites every outbound URL in an afternoon, a merchant retires a product line, a promotion ends, a shortener shuts down. One event can take out hundreds of links simultaneously — which is why an audit tends to find either almost nothing or a great deal, and why a single check is worth less than a recurring one.
How to audit for it
Check where a link actually ends after every redirect, not whether the first URL responds.
A tracking tag present at the start and absent at the end is the same as no tag at all.
A 200 response proves a server answered. It proves nothing about whether the offer still exists.
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