Automating Affiliate Linking

The Challenge

A media company operating both B2B and B2C properties was generating meaningful affiliate referral revenue—but the process of matching the right affiliate links to the right content across dozens of editorial websites was almost entirely manual. Editorial and commerce teams were spending hours each week researching products, generating links, and placing them. It was a process that couldn't scale with the company's growing content volume, and it meant that a significant portion of the content portfolio had no affiliate monetization at all.

Our Approach

We designed and built an end-to-end automation pipeline that eliminated manual affiliate link management entirely. The system runs autonomously on a nightly schedule, continuously improving link relevance and coverage across the entire portfolio—no human intervention required.

What We Built

1. AI-powered entity extraction that automatically identifies products, brands, and commercially relevant entities within every article across dozens of editorial sites—understanding context, not just keywords.
2. Scheduled nightly API integrations with Amazon's Product Advertising API to retrieve candidate affiliate links for each extracted entity, ensuring product data stays fresh and relevant.
3. Intelligent AI-driven selection layer that evaluates and ranks candidate products, choosing the most relevant and highest-converting match for each entity based on contextual fit and historical performance.
4. Dynamic affiliate product widget embedded on each article page, rendering contextually appropriate affiliate links complete with proper attribution parameters for accurate revenue tracking across the entire portfolio.

The Impact

What once required hours of manual curation per week now runs entirely on its own. Affiliate link coverage expanded dramatically across the portfolio, capturing revenue from content that previously had no affiliate monetization. The system processes new content automatically as it's published, meaning affiliate revenue now scales directly with editorial output—with zero incremental effort.