The quick version:
AI answers let shoppers compare products without clicking a tracked link, so commissions go unpaid even when your content fed the answer.
US affiliate spend is still about 13.81 billion dollars this year, so demand is fine, the tracking path is what broke.
Nearly 7 in 10 publishers are diversifying to owned channels to survive it.
The attribution gap is real
When someone asks a chatbot to compare two laptops and gets a clean answer in the chat, they never click your link. No click means no commission, even if your reviews trained the model. That gap is widening as AI handles more buying research.
Where smart publishers are moving
The money has not dried up. Affiliate is tied to roughly 241 billion dollars in ecommerce sales this year. The serious operators are spreading their bets into channels they own, especially email newsletters and niche communities. Search the affiliate threads on Reddit and you will see the same advice repeated, build something Google and the AI models cannot switch off.
What to do now
Stop treating the tracked link as the only thing that matters. Build an owned audience of buyers who trust your reviews. A list of five thousand engaged readers is worth more in 2026 than fifty thousand drive-by visitors who may never see a link again.
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