How to find broken affiliate links before they cost you

November 5, 2026 · 7 min read

Most broken affiliate links don't look broken. The link works, the network records the click, and the shopper lands somewhere they can't buy. Nothing on your site errors out, and your revenue just gets a little smaller each month.

Seven ways affiliate links fail quietly

The product is gone. The store page answers 404. This is the only one most people notice.
The product bounces to the home page. Many stores redirect discontinued products to their home page instead of showing an error. The page loads fine; the shopper rarely searches again.
Out of stock. The page works, the price is there, and the Add to cart button isn't.
The program paused or ended. Depending on the network, clicks land on an "inactive link" page, a fallback page you chose, or the store with tracking that no longer pays.
Untracked links. Plain links to a store you already earn from elsewhere on the site, or Amazon product links without your tag. They work perfectly and pay nothing.
Someone else's account ID. Links from an old account, a former writer, a previous owner or a plugin can carry an ID that isn't yours. Sales through them pay someone else.
No sub-ID. The sale is paid, but you can't tell which page earned it, so you can't tell which pages to update first.

Why ordinary link checkers miss most of them

A general link checker requests each address and looks for an error code. An affiliate link answers with a redirect, which looks healthy. A product that bounced to the home page answers 200 OK. So does an out-of-stock page. Only the first of the seven shows up as an error.

There's a second problem: to see where an affiliate link goes, a general checker follows it, and following it is a click at the network. Run a checker across a few thousand links every week and you've sent a few thousand bot clicks through your own account. Networks filter much of that, but it's not traffic you want attached to your publisher ID.

How to check them without clicking them

Almost every affiliate link names the store page it leads to, inside the link itself: u= on Impact links, url= on CJ, ued= on Awin, murl= on Rakuten, destination: on Partnerize. Amazon and eBay links are the product page with your tag added. Read that address out of the link and open it directly, the way a shopper typing it would. That checks the product without touching your tracking.

Start with the 20 pages that earn the most (your network reports by sub-ID, or your analytics' top pages with affiliate links).
For each link, copy the store address out of the link and open it in a private window. Is it a 404? Did it land on the home page? Does the page say out of stock?
Check the account ID in each link against your own: the number after click- on CJ links, after /c/ on Impact links, awinaffid= on Awin, tag= on Amazon.
Look for plain links to stores you're in a program with, and for Amazon links without tag=. Amazon's own Link Checker (in Associates Central, under Tools) confirms links you edited by hand are tagged.
Note which links have no sub-ID, and add one naming the page.

How often

Your top pages: monthly. Products churn fastest in electronics, fashion and sporting goods; a model year can retire half your links at once.
Whenever a network emails about a program change, and after a store redesigns its site (URLs often change wholesale).
The whole site: once a quarter is a reasonable floor; weekly if affiliate links are most of your revenue.

What to fix first

Someone else's account ID, on any page. That's money leaving today.
Gone, home-page and out-of-stock links on your highest-traffic pages: replace with the product's new page, its successor model, or the same product at another store you're approved with.
Untracked links: swap them for your affiliate link.
Missing sub-IDs: add them as you touch each page, so next month's fixes can be ranked by what each page actually earns.

Check your whole site, free

The free link check reads up to 100 pages across your sitemap and finds every one of these: gone, bounced, out of stock, untracked, someone else's ID, no sub-ID. It reads the store address out of each link and never clicks one.

Check my links

Sources: Awin: Link Status, troubleshooting inactive links · Amazon Associates: Can I check if my links are tagging to my account?.