Nick Beck outlines why and how affiliate marketers could become one of the strongest performance channels for brands in the era of AI search.
Here’s a number worth knowing. Last September, OpenAI launched a way to buy things straight inside ChatGPT. Big names signed up. Etsy, Shopify, Walmart, Target.
OpenAI said over a million shops would follow. By March, fewer than fifteen ever did. The company quietly switched it off, five months after switching it on.
The lesson isn’t that AI shopping failed. It’s that the buy button was never the hard part. Getting people to trust the recommendation was.
That’s worth remembering, because the ads have now properly arrived. Since May, any US business can buy them, no minimum spend needed. OpenAI wants $2.5bn from ads this year, and $100bn by 2030. This is not a small test they’ll quietly drop. They’re building it to last.
And the format is still moving. Last month, OpenAI started testing ‘sponsored agents’, ads that open a live conversation with a brand’s own AI, rather than just a message. Wayfair and Angi are early testers.
Picture asking ChatGPT how to fix a broken pipe, and an ad offers to book you a tradesperson on the spot. From a failed buy button, to static ads, to a live conversation that leads straight into booking.
And here’s the good news buried in all this. Research from CJ found that when ChatGPT answers questions about big brands’ products, up to 91% of what it’s reading comes from affiliate style content.
Reviews, comparisons, ‘best of’ guides. That’s not a small detail. It shows the AI needs exactly the kind of content performance marketers have built for twenty years to give a good answer. The buy button failed. The content it relied on didn’t. If anything, it matters more now.
But getting picked once isn’t the same as being trusted. Ask anyone working in AI search and one word comes up again and again. Consistency.
An AI doesn’t trust a source because of one great article. It trusts a source that keeps showing up, accurate and useful, again and again, over months. That’s a different skill to chasing one big win. It rewards the patient, steady work performance marketers already do well, as long as it keeps going rather than stopping after one good piece.
None of this paid activity works alone. Sponsored agents still lean on the same trust CJ’s research points to. A brand can buy its way into the conversation. The content is what makes people stay in it.
The way people get paid for that work does need to catch up, and that’s an opportunity, not a problem. Right now, someone can read a comparison, then buy the product somewhere else entirely, and the tracking often won’t see the connection. But this is fixable.
OpenAI’s own ad reporting only shows seven basic numbers so far: views, clicks, spend, click rate, cost-per-click, cost-per-thousand views, and sales. That’s thin, but every platform starts this way. Search reporting looked just as basic in its early years.
It also means looking past cost-per-click. With formats like sponsored agents, what matters more is how well a conversation converts, and how often a brand gets recommended at all.
An AI is only as good as what it reads, and this industry has spent years building exactly the kind of trusted, useful content an AI needs. The point is simple. The job now isn’t to worry. It’s to make sure your content is worth reading, again and again, not just once.
So what should you actually do?
Treat this as an early, open moment, not a threat. The brands and publishers who start measuring this properly now, before the tools get better, will have the clearest proof of their value once everyone else catches up.
Look at your best performing content already. That’s a strong clue for what an AI will want to use next. Keep building on it. Don’t stop after one good piece.
There’s also a real chance to make money here that didn’t exist eighteen months ago. If your content is already doing most of the work behind these answers, there’s a fair case for brands to pay for that, not just for the click at the end.
Nobody has built that deal properly yet. Getting the measurement and consistency right early matters more here than it ever did with search, which is exactly the kind of problem worth getting specialist help with. Whoever works this out first, with or without that help, will be setting the rules for everyone else.
The ads aren’t a threat. They’re proof the whole system OpenAI is building runs on the kind of content this industry already does best.
Learn now, measure properly, and get paid fairly for the influence you’re already having, not just once, but again and again. Do that, and you’ll be setting the terms long before everyone else works out what’s happening.
