The scale of affiliate marketing in 2026 is bigger than most people in the industry realize.
US advertisers will spend $13.81 billion on affiliate marketing in 2026, up 11.3% from $12.42 billion in 2025. The channel will generate an estimated $241.03 billion in US ecommerce sales in 2026. That growth rate is significantly higher than the growth rate of US retail ecommerce sales overall at 6.7% during the same period.
When affiliate is growing at 11.3% in a market growing at 6.7%, it is taking market share from every other channel. That is what a maturing performance channel looks like — it gets more efficient and more dominant simultaneously.
Discount and promotions publishers claimed 42.4% of US affiliate marketing revenues in the first half of 2025, up from 39.7% a year earlier. Seven of the ten largest affiliate publisher types increased coupon use in the first half of 2025. Among email publishers, 50.1% of sales included a coupon.
The coupon and discount angle is dominating affiliate revenue. If you run an affiliate site that does not have a deals or coupon component, you are missing the category capturing the largest single share of affiliate spend right now.
Reddit's r/just start at https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/ has threads comparing revenue per visitor across different affiliate content types. The deal and coupon pages are consistently outperforming pure review content on revenue efficiency even when review pages drive more organic traffic.
The Attribution Problem That Is Getting Worse
Rising AI chatbot use will deprive publishers of the click-based credit they need to sustain content production. Move beyond last-click attribution. Multi-touch attribution models are replacing last-click, meaning affiliates who assist earlier in the customer journey now get credited for their contribution.
X at https://x.com/search?q=affiliate+marketing+attribution+AI+2026 has affiliate managers and publishers debating how to handle the attribution gap when AI chatbots answer the discovery question but the purchase still happens on the merchant site.
Quora at https://www.quora.com/How-does-AI-search-affect-affiliate-marketing-attribution has practical answers from affiliate program managers on which attribution models are being adopted to account for AI-assisted discovery that does not produce a trackable click.
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