The Quiet Leak

I run affiliate websites. Have for years. I write reviews, recommend products, include affiliate links, and when someone buys through one of those links, I earn a commission. It's a simple model and it works.

What I didn't realize for a long time is how much of it silently stops working.

A few months ago I decided to audit one of my sites. Not the content, not the SEO. Just the links. I went through every affiliate URL on every page and checked whether it actually led where it was supposed to.

The results were bad.

Products had been discontinued. Merchants had restructured their URLs. Tracking parameters had been stripped during redirects, which means the click still worked for the visitor but the commission didn't register for me. Some links pointed to 404 pages. Others redirected to a homepage instead of the product page, which technically works but kills the conversion.

Nobody told me about any of this. No affiliate network sends you an email when a product gets delisted. No merchant notifies you when they change their URL structure. The links just quietly break, and you quietly lose money.

I tried to find a tool that does this. Something that scans a site, checks every affiliate link, and tells you what's broken. The options were thin.

The big players in this space are Skimlinks and Sovrn. They work by injecting a JavaScript snippet on your page that rewrites your links through their network. In exchange for handling the affiliate relationships for you, they take 25% of your commissions. Twenty-five percent. On every sale, forever.

That model made sense in 2012 when affiliate management was manual and painful. It makes less sense now. If you already have relationships with your affiliate networks (and most serious publishers do), paying a quarter of your revenue for link management is a bad deal. You're not buying intelligence. You're renting convenience at a premium.

What I actually wanted was simpler: scan my site, show me what's broken, tell me how much money I'm probably losing. Don't touch my links, don't take a cut, don't insert yourself between me and my affiliate partners. Just show me the problems and let me fix them.

That tool didn't exist. So I started building it.

LinkPulse

I'm building this with Marco, my oldest friend. We've known each other since we were kids. He handles the business side, I handle the product.

LinkPulse does one thing well: it scans your affiliate links and tells you which ones need attention. It detects 16 affiliate networks (Amazon, Awin, CJ, bol.com, Daisycon, ShareASale, Rakuten, and more), follows redirect chains, checks HTTP status codes, and flags everything that's broken, redirected, or stripped of tracking parameters.

The output isn't just "link X is broken." It's "link X on page Y is broken, that page gets Z visitors per month, and based on your average conversion rate, you're losing approximately this much money." Revenue impact, not just status codes.

It's a WordPress plugin. Install it, run a scan, see the results in your dashboard. No account needed for the free tier, which covers up to 500 links. That's enough for most small to mid-size affiliate sites. If you need unlimited scans and scheduled monitoring, there's a paid plan.

We also built a REST API for developers and an MCP server, which means AI tools like Claude can talk to LinkPulse directly. That last part might sound niche, but I think it matters. The affiliate industry is moving toward AI-assisted content creation. When an AI agent writes a product review, it should be able to check whether the affiliate links it's inserting actually work. That's what the MCP server enables.

Why this, why now

I could have just fixed my own links and moved on. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized this is a universal problem that nobody is solving well.

The affiliate industry does over $20 billion a year globally. Studies estimate that 1-2% of commissions are lost to link rot. That's hundreds of millions of dollars leaking out of the system annually, and most publishers don't even know it's happening because the failure mode is silence. A broken link doesn't throw an error. It just stops earning.

The existing solutions either take a massive cut of your revenue (Skimlinks model) or don't exist. There's a gap between "do it manually" and "give away 25% of everything." LinkPulse sits in that gap.

I'm not going to pretend this is a sure thing. It's a new product with zero users. Marco and I are bootstrapping it, which means we move at the speed of two people with other commitments. The WordPress plugin is solid but still early. The MCP server works but the market for AI-native affiliate tools is, to put it mildly, young.

What I do know is that the problem is real because I've felt it. And the existing solutions are either overpriced or nonexistent. That's usually a reasonable place to start building.

If you run affiliate sites, take a look. The free tier is genuinely free. No credit card, no trial period, no bait-and-switch. Scan your links, see what's broken, decide if it's worth paying for.

LinkPulse scans your affiliate links and shows you what's broken. Free for up to 500 links.