Why I Would not Begin Affiliate Advertising and marketing in 2025 (And What I might Do As a substitute)

Again within the day, I ran a few semi-successful affiliate web sites. I even as soon as ranked #1 for “greatest protein powder.” This was a fairly profitable key phrase given its business intent and excessive search quantity.

Ever since then, the concept of beginning one other affiliate web site and getting severe about it has all the time been behind my thoughts. I’ve simply by no means had the time attributable to my each day work at Ahrefs.

However right now? I don’t assume I’d begin one even when I had the time. It simply isn’t price it.

Loads of different on-line entrepreneurs appear to be echoing this sentiment these days, too.

Beneath are 4 the explanation why I really feel like this and wouldn’t begin a pure affiliate web site in 2025.

Reddit appears to rank within the prime 5 for just about each affiliate key phrase these days.

That is even the case with YMYL keywords:

And the problem is only getting worse…

When Google recently penalized the affiliate directories of many big publications like CNN Underscored, it overwhelmingly gave that traffic to Reddit—not independent publishers. I know this because we studied it.

How? We looked at 6,179 keywords that declined or had been completely lost for the directories below between November 18th and November 25th:

• https://www.wsj.com/buyside/
• https://reviewed.usatoday.com/
• www.independent.co.uk/advisor
• www.thesun.co.uk/shopping/
• www.forbes.com/advisor/
• www.newsweek.com/vault/
• www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/

We then used the Traffic Share by Domain report in Keywords Explorer to see which sites get the most traffic from these keywords. Reddit was #1, taking 6% of traffic. 

Given that 51% of Reddit threads ranking for product review keywords have spam as the top comment (as per Glen Allsopp’s incredible research), it is a fairly dire state of affairs. For many product assessment key phrases, there’s nearly all the time a distinct segment affiliate web site extra deserving of rating than Reddit.

For instance, take a time period like “greatest air air purifier for cigarette smoke.” Reddit ranks in place #2, however the thread is a complete spamfest.

The highest remark seems to be straight from ChatGPT:

The second seems to be like a disguised product pitch:

The third once more seems to be like a ChatGPT particular:

Now you may argue that the majority affiliate websites are not any higher—and I might agree. However there are additionally loads of area of interest web site house owners who make investments closely of their content material, spend numerous hours really testing merchandise, and really should rank.

For instance, take a web site like HouseFresh which ranks #6 for a similar question.

The blokes behind this web site thoroughly test each product they advocate:

But when we take all of the key phrases this web site ranks within the prime 10 for, plug them into Ahrefs’ Key phrases Explorer and test the Site visitors Share by Area report, we see that Google remains to be sending Reddit extra site visitors.

Given the deal Google lately made with Reddit to make use of their content material to coach its AI fashions, this development most likely isn’t going to alter any time quickly.

Be actual: are you actually looking out Google for product suggestions nowadays? I rarely do. I simply go straight to YouTube…

Now clearly, we’re entrepreneurs. We all know that a lot of the prime Google outcomes are sometimes spammy and shouldn’t be trusted. However what about everybody else?

I don’t have knowledge on this, however I’ve seen mainstream YouTubers speaking about it numerous instances.

For instance, this video on why Google search is falling apart has 3.7 million views. In it, he talks about how trying to find the perfect merchandise is pointless due to how horrible Google outcomes are for product searches.

It’s received to a stage now the place trying to find the perfect of mainly something is pointless. Nearly each single article is a prime 10 of merchandise not chosen primarily based on their advantage however in actual fact simply whether or not or not they’ll get a kickback once you purchase them. […] I assure that a big slice of those articles are written with the author not really having purchased and examined all 10 merchandise themselves.

I believe there are three predominant the explanation why the outcomes are so dangerous:

1. The inflow of AI spam. Ever since ChatGPT and generative AI got here on the scene, it’s turn into tremendous straightforward and low cost to create affiliate content material. Google appears to be struggling to filter out this spam at scale.
2. Parasite search engine marketing. That is the place entrepreneurs reap the benefits of the authority of a longtime web site to rank for aggressive key phrases. It’s why we’ve been seeing websites like Forbes, CNN, and WSJ outranking impartial websites for issues they’ve completely no experience in, like “greatest monetary advisors.”
3. Google rating Reddit. Most of those threads are spamfests as I discussed above.

For my part, these three causes are additionally interconnected…

Google handled the inflow of AI spam by boosting the search presence of huge manufacturers that it thought it may belief. These manufacturers then took benefit of Google’s favouritism to rank for phrases the place that they had no experience. Google then responded to criticism concerning the lack of variety in search outcomes (principally from the search engine marketing {industry}) by selling user-generated content material on Reddit.

In fact, it’s nonetheless attainable to advertise affiliate hyperlinks elsewhere like TikTok or YouTube—however that’s a complete totally different kettle of fish.

When Glen Allsopp analyzed 10,000 product review search results, he discovered that solely 4 of the highest 100 rating domains had been impartial websites. The remainder had been a part of information organisations, public firms or massive web site networks.

Even worse, 36 of the highest 100 rating domains had been owned by simply three totally different firms: Hearst, Dotdash Meredith, and Future.

I don’t assume that is going to get higher anytime quickly both…

Wanting extra intently at our analysis on affiliate publication drops, the websites reaping the most important rewards alongside Reddit had been all additionally huge names, like Amazon, Enterprise Insider, and CNET.

And most of the impartial publishers who noticed their site visitors decimated by Google updates nonetheless haven’t recovered…

Check out Retrododo, for instance:

Certain, they’ve recovered a bit—however their site visitors remains to be a shadow of its former self.

Housefresh is about the one web site I’ve seen make a near-full restoration, and I can’t assist however really feel which may have one thing to do with the quantity of fuss they (fairly rightly) kicked up about being penalized.

However this uncertainty is exactly the issue…

Possibly I’m misremembering, however I’m positive that issues didn’t was once this manner. Again within the day, for those who put a ton of effort into creating a high quality area of interest web site, you may be fairly positive that Google would reward you. You wouldn’t be fearful of the time, effort and cash you invested being taken away at any given second by a Google penalty and your site visitors handed to huge manufacturers (or Reddit) with mediocre content material—at the least to not the identical extent as right now.

This doesn’t imply that the entire thing is Google’s fault. It additionally appears to be taking place as a result of the search engine marketing methods of huge manufacturers are getting extra refined.

For instance, this post from HouseFresh talks a couple of technique referred to as key phrase swarming allegedly utilized by Dotdash Meredith to push down smaller websites within the SERPs:

“Swarming is about drowning out a competitor,” stated the one that reached out. The target is to “swarm a smaller web site’s foothold on one or two articles by basically publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority.”

Bottomline? I simply wouldn’t have the boldness nowadays to take a position considerably in an affiliate web site. Even when I created industry-leading content material, I wouldn’t have religion that Google would really rank it above huge websites.

Okay, this one is extra of a predication… however I believe there’s a really actual risk of it taking place.

Affiliate websites have labored effectively traditionally due to how folks search. If you wish to discover the perfect air air purifier, you go to Google, seek for “greatest air air purifier,” click on a listicle within the search outcomes, click on one among their affiliate hyperlinks, and… BINGO, the positioning makes cash.

However what if Google provides AI overviews with product suggestions to affiliate searches?

I believe this has the potential to chop out affiliate entrepreneurs altogether.

For instance, for those who kind “greatest air air purifier” into Gemini or ChatGPT proper now, you get a listing of suggestions:

It’s fairly straightforward to then analysis these suggestions your self on YouTube or TikTok.

If Google provides these sorts of AI overviews to product assessment searches, folks wouldn’t actually need to click on on a search end result anymore. They may simply analysis the merchandise AI recommends themselves.

In fact, they might nonetheless select to analysis these merchandise in Google, so affiliate entrepreneurs may nonetheless generate income from product evaluations. However I believe it’s extra doubtless that they head to YouTube or TikTok for the explanations I discussed earlier.

As for why Google would trouble, it’s arguably a greater person expertise—however they might additionally monetize these AI overviews with PPC adverts. 

For instance, Google already reveals sponsored outcomes once you seek for most merchandise:

Google may simply simply cost these manufacturers for clicks when the product is really useful in AI overviews.

I believe Matt Diggity has the appropriate thought: swap to ecommerce.

When you learn my takeaways from interviewing Ash Young of CarMats.co.uk, you’ll know that ecommerce can be extremely lucrative—even in boring niches. Ash is on track to do £10M in total sales in under 5 years.

There’s a simple way to find ecommerce niches in Ahrefs, too:

1. Run a blank search in Keywords Explorer
2. Filter for non-local and non-branded keywords with transactional intent
3. Filter for low difficulty keywords, KD <= 10
4. Filter for keywords with low DR sites ranking, DR <= 40

It’s then simply a case of looking for interesting niches in the results…

For example, there are 33K estimated monthly searches for “leg warmers” in the US, and plenty of pages from low DR websites ranking with few or no backlinks.

If we plug “leg warmers” into Keywords Explorer as our seed keyword, go to the Matching terms report, apply the same filters, and then cluster by Parent Topic, we have a low-competition ecommerce niche pretty much ready to go.

I’m sure you wouldn’t need to move mountains to rank for most of these terms. It would probably just take some basic SEO.

If you want to learn more, read our guide to ecommerce SEO.

Got questions? Ping me on LinkedIn or X.