AI Affiliate Websites
Build content that ranks, recommend software you would use anyway, and earn on what people buy.
Affiliate performance
Clicks, conversions and commission
| Event | Campaign | Page | Commission |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commission | Cold email tool | best-cold-email-tools | +€42 |
| Refund clawback | Design suite | — | -€9 |
| Commission | Design suite | figma-alternatives | +€9 |
| Commission | Managed hosting | hosting-comparison | +€17.50 |
| Click | Managed hosting | hosting-comparison | — |
| Commission | Cold email tool | best-cold-email-tools | +€42 |
- Cold email toolbest-cold-email-tools€126
- Managed hostinghosting-comparison€52
- Design suitefigma-alternatives€36
Example figures. These amounts show how the workflow behaves — they are not earnings, not ours and not anyone else's. Nobody made this money.
Open full screen · recording mode — sized for vertical video.
Read this before the opportunity
This one demonstrates far better than it performs. Its content score is 8.2 against a business score of 5.8 — a gap of 2.4 points. That pattern is exactly what the get-rich-with-AI industry is built on: strategies that look spectacular in a short video and disappoint in practice.
A commission feed is the cleanest money visual there is, and the model is easy to explain.
Follow these prompts to start building your income stream
6 steps. Paste each prompt into Claude, use what comes out, move to the next. The last one ends in something live — not in a plan to make something live.
- 01
Pick your audience and start a list
Free sampleOne audience, and an email list before you write anything.
In this step you decide who you are writing for, and you set up the one channel a platform cannot take away. Search traffic to this kind of site has been squeezed hard by AI summaries, so the list is not a nice-to-have — it is the part of the asset you actually own.
1 — Choose the audienceI want to build a site that earns affiliate commission, but I want to start from an audience rather than from a keyword. Groups I understand: [YOUR GROUPS] What I can genuinely evaluate or test myself: [WHAT YOU CAN TEST] Per group: 1. What they buy where the choice is genuinely hard, and why. 2. What they cannot find out from a product page or a generic review. 3. Where they currently ask for advice — the forum, the group, the subreddit. 4. What kind of recommendation they would actually trust, and from whom. 5. Whether I can add anything beyond re-describing specifications. Then rank by where my own experience shortens someone's decision, and be blunt about any group where I would just be repeating manufacturer copy.
2 — Set up the listSet up the email channel for a site serving [AUDIENCE]. Give me: 1. The one thing worth subscribing for, specific to this audience — not "updates". 2. The sign-up copy: what they get, how often, and what I will never do with their address. 3. The welcome email, sent immediately, that delivers something useful straight away. 4. A realistic sending rhythm I can hold, and what each send contains. 5. The consent and unsubscribe requirements to build in from the start. Keep it small enough to run with a free tier while the site has no traffic.
Claude for the plan and copy; any email platform with a free tier.
- [WHAT YOU CAN TEST]
- Products you own, tools you use, work you have done. Without this you are writing what everyone else writes.
- [AUDIENCE]
- The group you chose.
Then: Put the sign-up form up before the first article. Traffic without capture is traffic you rent.
Where the prompt stops: Email consent is regulated — GDPR in the EU, CAN-SPAM in the US, and stricter rules in some countries. Get the consent wording right at the start; retrofitting a list is not possible.
- 02
Join two or three programmes
In the packageProgrammes joined, with their rules in your own words.
In this step you find out what you are actually allowed to do, and what you will really be paid. Programme terms decide the business: cookie windows, excluded products, whether commission survives a refund, and whether the brand permits the channels you planned to use.
- 03
Write your first review
In the packageOne review of something you actually used, with the disclosure on it.
In this step you write the first piece, and you write it about something you have used. That is the whole differentiator left in this strategy: a model can produce a specification summary in seconds, so the only thing worth publishing is what you know from use.
- 04
Publish it and share it
In the packageThe review live, and in front of the people it was written for.
In this step you get it read. Waiting for search traffic is the slow path and, since AI summaries, an unreliable one — so you take it to the places where the question is being asked. Rules about self-promotion are strict there, which is exactly why participating properly works.
- 05
Publish five more pieces
In the packageFive more pieces live, each with a job to do.
In this step you go from one article to a set. Different pieces do different jobs: the comparison catches people deciding, the how-to catches people already using, the mistakes piece is the one people send to each other. You end with a schedule instead of a burst.
- 06
Check what actually earned
In the packageWhat earned, what did not, and whether to keep going.
In this step you find out whether the model works for you at this scale. The research behind this strategy is unflattering: search economics changed, and most sites in this space never earn. Knowing early which of your pieces did anything is what lets you either commit properly or stop cheaply.
5 of the 6 steps are in AI Money
The sample above is a real step, not a teaser — it is the same depth as the rest. The package adds the other 5 for this strategy, and the same treatment for the other eleven.
Your first 7 days
- 1Choose an audience you can serve for years, not a keyword with volume.
- 2Start the channel you own — a newsletter or a community — on day one.
- 3Write three pages about products you have genuinely used.
- 4Apply to two or three affiliate programmes and read their terms properly.
Your first 30 days
- 1Publish only what you would send to a friend who asked.
- 2Add disclosure on every page containing affiliate links, as required.
- 3Measure subscribers, not sessions — the subscriber is the asset.
- 4Review which programmes actually convert and drop the rest.
What you need
core means you cannot skip it. The rest only if you need it.
- Ahrefscorefree planKeyword and backlink research
- SemrushCompetitive and content-gap analysis
- Surfer SEOOn-page structure and briefs
- FraseResearch-backed content briefs
- WordPress.comcorefree planThe site itself
- Kit (voorheen ConvertKit)corefree planThe list that makes you independent of search
- Originality.aiCheck what you publish before Google does
Want the research?— what it is, what it costs, and how we scored it
What you can actually watch
A commission notification arriving, campaign name and amount.
What it is
You build content sites that rank in search, recommend products and software, and earn a commission on what readers buy. The AI-heavy version fills those sites with generated reviews, guides and listicles.
Why this opportunity
Where it still works, it works because the recommendation is genuinely useful to a specific audience: affiliate income has not died, it has moved to places with their own audience — newsletters, communities, video, and brands with repeat visitors. What is measurably shrinking is the search-traffic-dependent, AI-filled variant.
Who this is for
For someone building an audience they own, who uses affiliate links as one income line rather than the business model. A poor fit for anyone hoping to publish hundreds of generated pages and wait.
The business model
Commission per sale or per lead, paid by merchants and affiliate networks. You own the content; you own neither the traffic nor the payout terms.
How money is made
Commission on referred purchases. Margin per transaction is high, but the revenue base is structurally shrinking for search-dependent sites.
Who pays
Affiliate networks and merchants pay you; readers pay them. Commissions can be cut or ended unilaterally, which is a risk you cannot price.
Finding customers
Historically organic search, entirely. That is exactly the dependency the evidence below attacks, which is why the defensible version starts from an audience rather than from keywords.
Delivery
Keyword research, articles, links, then waiting for indexing and ranking. The waiting is the business risk: you spend everything up front and find out months later.
Where AI actually helps
Very high in production, which is the problem rather than the opportunity. When production cost falls for everyone, the constraint moves to trust and distribution — and neither of those got cheaper.
Skills you need
Low to medium to publish; high to rank. Real product knowledge is what separates a page worth reading from one Google's spam policy describes.
What it costs to start
Low: domain, hosting, model costs. The expensive input is months of your time before any revenue exists.
How to price it
You do not set prices; you choose programmes. Commission height correlates inversely with product quality more often than people expect — the best tools often pay nothing.
Common mistakes
Building on search traffic alone. Pew Research Center (22 July 2025, Tier 2, VERIFIED, n=68,879 searches by 900 US adults) found that searches showing an AI summary sent 8% of visits onward to a regular result, against 15% without one — and only 1% clicked a link inside the summary. That nearly halves the economics of a site built on informational queries. Google Search Central's spam policy (Tier 1, updated 2026-08-28) names it directly: scaled content abuse is "Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users." Second mistake: reviewing products you never used — the FTC rule on fake reviews and testimonials (effective 21 October 2024, penalties above $50,000 per violation) is exactly this risk zone.
Scaling
Scalability 8 on paper against demand 3. Scale by deepening one audience's trust, not by multiplying pages — page multiplication is the behaviour now explicitly penalised.
The version that holds up
Invert the dependency: build a newsletter or a community first and let the content serve those people, with affiliate links as a consequence rather than a purpose. That version survives the traffic shift because you are not renting your audience from a search engine that has become your competitor.
Time to first revenue
6–18 months
6–18+ months, assuming you rank at all — and that assumption is precisely what the evidence undercuts. With a new domain and no authority, no revenue at all is a fully plausible outcome rather than an edge case.
How it scored
Ten axes, scored. Risk scored 6 out of 10, where higher is worse.
The state of this market
Build the narrow version, not the volume version. One number explains why. Pew found that searches showing an AI summary sent 8% of visits onward, against 15% without one — that nearly halves the economics of any site that lives on search traffic. Google's spam policy also now bans scaled content without added value, methodology-agnostic. The version that still works is narrow, genuinely useful and not built for volume.
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