Google Visibility Plummets But Some Publishers Still See Affiliate Revenue Growing

Reports of affiliate revenue’s death may be at least partially exaggerated.

The income stream does appear to be under strain: alongside its 21% cuts to headcount announced last week, Business Insider told staff the brand will be “exiting the majority of our commerce business,” citing its overreliance on volatile search referral traffic.

In the latter half of 2024, companies with large affiliate content operations including Forbes, CNN and Time reportedly saw significant drops in their Google visibility, Adweek reported. Mail Online’s director of SEO and e-commerce Carly Steven similarly disclosed that Google’s June 2024 anti-spam update had badly hit its affiliate revenue—ie, the money it earns when its readers click through from its site to make a purchase on an online vendor.

The update had “effectively turned off a very significant revenue stream for a lot of publishers,” Steven said.

Google has since rolled out its AI Overviews more widely and, as of last month, also launched its ChatGPT-like AI Mode, both of which undermine the number of users likely to click through to a publisher site—and, for those publishing affiliate content, then go on to make a purchase.

But some publishers are still reporting solid results for affiliate.

The New York Times Company, for example, has reported year-on-year growth of between 3.7% and 16.3% in its “other revenue” category for each of the last four quarters, citing growing affiliate Wirecutter revenue as the main reason or a major factor each time. (The segment also includes licensing revenue, which the company has also credited for growth.) In its most recent report, the publication predicted the segment would again grow in the “mid-single-digits” year-on-year in the second quarter.

The NYT is something of a unique example because Wirecutter is a subscriber product and may benefit from more trust and loyalty than other affiliate content publishers, but growth hasn’t been limited to paywalled services.

IAC’s Dotdash Meredith reported an 11% year-on-year increase in its “performance marketing” revenue (i.e. revenue earned on ads when a goal such as a product sale is achieved) in the first quarter. Future, which uses affiliate links on brands like tech site Tom’s Guide, reported a 9% organic increase in its affiliate revenue in the half ending 31 March.

The Arena Group, which publishes brands including TheStreet, Athlon Sports and Men’s Journal, reported $10.9 million in performance marketing revenue in 2024—a more than 200% year-on-year increase. And the UK’s Reach, which has long published affiliate links and last year launched its own product marketplace, Yimbly, said it saw a 39% year-on-year increase in e-commerce revenue in its last full-year report.

Crackdown on Parasites

The affiliate content visibility decline reported last year was mainly driven by Google’s crackdown on so-called “parasite SEO” content, in which a brand uses its general SEO authority to drive traffic to parts of its site focused on areas outside its core competency—i.e. product reviews featuring links through to Amazon, for example. Google regards this sort of content as third-party piggybacking if it’s irrelevant to the publisher’s content, even when written by the site’s own staff.

The poster child for this practice was Forbes Marketplace, a company separate from Forbes but which ran parts of the business publisher’s website focused on affiliate marketing, as well as similar propositions for CNN and USA Today.

Despite that controversy, and the sharp Google visibility fall that reportedly followed, Forbes told AMO that its affiliate revenue remained robust without providing further details.

“We continue to see strong performance in our affiliate business,” Forbes’s Chief Technology Officer, Vadim Supitskiy, said. “Forbes remains dedicated to delivering reliable and trusted product and service recommendations to its users. This area is continuing to be a growth area for us and is drawing consistent audience interest from diverse referral sources.”

Why are some publishers seeing increases in affiliate revenue while some are seeing a decline?

Lars Lofgren, a co-founder at performance marketing agency Stone Press who wrote at length about Forbes Marketplace last year, told AMO this month that revenue increases “don’t necessarily mean an affiliate program is healthy.

“You can keep revenue growing for a while just by squeezing your current affiliates with higher rates. This can happen even as your traffic drops, or a while anyway, then it completely collapses.”

But he also noted that affiliate revenue “is subject to pretty extreme power laws.

“When you’re winning at a high value rank #1, it feels like you’re printing money. But at #6? It’s a trickle. Especially these days, SEO has gotten so binary (you either win crazy or get nothing).”

Size, then, may explain the disparity.

Adam Small, the founder of Third Planet Media, a gambling and gaming-focused media company focused on affiliate content, said Google’s changes had “unquestionably created a headwind for companies that depend on affiliate revenue.

“As more and more queries result in an attempt by Google to answer within the question at the top of the search results, affiliates, who usually need people to click through to their site before there’s a chance to monetize, have to live with less click-through traffic.

“That said, we’re still able to get traffic and clicks via the other features, and so far, Google has only made it harder, not impossible to make money as an affiliate. The overall search affiliate business is probably declining somewhat right now, but there’s still plenty of opportunity.”

Chris Walton, a strategist at analytics consultancy Net Impression, said his business works with several e-commerce brands “whose SEO performance hasn’t dipped despite the rise of LLMs… None of them have picked up any traffic from the AI models either.”

The brands that had lost traffic, he said, were either “generic content mills that fail to match user intent tightly enough to beat AI convenience” or “sites focused on complex, high-trust topics (e.g. health, finance), where users now default to AI summaries.”

Walton said his team had been running visibility tests inside AI models to figure out which sources get surfaced in AI responses, finding that “LLMs are leaning heavily on social validation layers like Reddit and X. That means businesses need to think beyond SEO and start building social signals… If your blog isn’t being linked to, talked about, or quoted on the platforms that matter to LLMs, you are losing brand exposure.”

Small, similarly, said he felt the best way to adapt was to stay “aimed at the end user and have the best possible answers to their questions… Publishers more and more need to be closely following the trends and following best SEO practices.”

For any publishers using paid search to promote their affiliate content, Ben Kruger, chief marketing officer of online marketplace Event Tickets Center, said it was “obvious that exact match keywords and very tight targeting will not work in the updated conversational search results landscape.”

He recommended publishers affected begin testing “the features that Google keeps talking about like PMAX, AI Max, Broad Match Keywords and smart bidding… Google is talking about these so much for a reason, and it’s in our best interest to figure them out so we don’t get shut out as the channel evolves.”

The four features Kruger described are all AI tools for marketers.

• PMAX: Short for “Performance Max,” a type of AI-powered Google performance ad campaign in which the advertiser can access all their Google Ads inventory from a single place.
• AI Max: A new AI-powered tool for advertising on Google search that the company says can capture users currently being missed.
• Broad match keywords: An option that allows advertisers to show their ads on Google searches related to a word or phrase, rather than exact or narrow matches.
• Smart bidding: A form of automated ad bidding that uses AI to optimize conversions.