Jenny Gonzalez of Rocahead speaks to Affiliate Leaders about whether the traditional affiliate model will still exist in the next decade.
One of the biggest talkings of 2026 has been around whether the traditional affiliate model will survive in this rapidly evolving marketing landscape.
Speaking ahead of her appearance at Affiliate Leaders Summit, Jenny Gonzalez, co-founder and chief executive, Rocahead, dives into what this actually means.
It’s not about the “death of a business model”, but how affiliate marketing is no longer a siloed channel; neither is influencer or SEO.
And in this new AI era, it’s more than just about having an omnichannel strategy, affiliates and marketers need to stand out. They need to own something that can’t be replicated by AI.
Gonzalez sits down with Affiliate Leaders to explore exactly this.
In this AI and zero-click era, some affiliate models simply won’t survive. From your vantage point running Rocahead, which classic affiliate setup – whether it’s review sites, arbitrage buyers, or SEO aggregators – is heading toward total extinction first? And why?
One of the biggest mistakes I see people making is confusing the death of a traffic source with the death of a business model. They are not the same thing.
SEO isn’t disappearing. Review sites aren’t disappearing. Arbitrage isn’t disappearing. What is disappearing is the ability to build a sustainable business around assets that are completely interchangeable.
If I had to identify the first model to become economically unviable, it would be the generic SEO affiliate site whose only real function is aggregating information that already exists elsewhere. For years, those businesses benefited from being the easiest way for users to compare products, bonuses, reviews or offers. Today, AI is steadily removing that advantage.
Search engines are no longer simply directing people to information. They are increasingly becoming the destination where information is consumed. When Google’s AI Overviews answer the question before a click happens, or when ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity summarise ten different reviews into a single response, the value of being the tenth website saying essentially the same thing drops dramatically.
The important distinction is that AI isn’t killing SEO. It’s exposing weak businesses that happened to rely on SEO. I’ve watched our industry go through similar moments before. Panda eliminated thousands of low quality publishers. Penguin changed how people thought about link building. Mobile forced affiliates to rethink user experience. GDPR reshaped data collection. Apple’s privacy changes rewrote media buying economics almost overnight.
Each time, people declared that affiliate marketing was dead but it wasn’t. What disappeared were businesses that had mistaken an algorithmic advantage for a competitive advantage.
That’s happening again. The affiliates who survive will not survive because they rank well. They’ll survive because they own something AI cannot easily replicate.
That might be a trusted brand. It might be a highly engaged community. It might be first-party customer data accumulated over many years. It might be proprietary comparison tools, exclusive commercial agreements, or technical infrastructure that creates a better customer experience.
Those are real assets. Thousands of generic review articles generated from similar prompts are not. In fact, I believe we’re entering a period where originality becomes more valuable precisely because AI makes average content almost free to produce.
When content becomes abundant, trust becomes scarce. That’s why I don’t think the first affiliate model to disappear is SEO. The first model to disappear is mediocrity.
We’re seeing search engines transition from portals to answer engines, while platforms tighten organic reach. Which specific traffic channel do you think affiliates rely on today that will become completely unviable within the next 24 to 36 months?
I don’t believe in making dramatic predictions simply for the sake of sounding bold, so I wouldn’t say any major traffic channel suddenly disappears.
Markets rarely work that way. What changes is the economics. A channel doesn’t have to fall to zero traffic to become effectively dead. It simply has to stop generating returns that justify the investment required to compete.
That’s exactly where I think informational SEO is heading.
For years, affiliates built enormous businesses by answering the earliest questions in the customer’s decision making journey: ‘what is the best casino?’, or ‘what’s the safest sportsbook?’. Those queries generated massive amounts of top of funnel traffic. Today, AI answers many of those questions instantly. The click never happens. Even when it does, the user arrives with much more information than before. That fundamentally changes how affiliates create value.
I believe the winners will increasingly focus on decision support rather than information delivery. There’s an enormous difference. Information has become a commodity. Helping someone make a confident decision has not.
That’s why I expect to see far more investment in calculators, interactive comparison engines, personalisation, communities, newsletters, creators, video, podcasts, proprietary data sets and niche expertise than another ten thousand informational articles.
The affiliates who continue thinking in terms of keywords will struggle. The affiliates who start thinking in terms of audiences will thrive. I’ve often said the next generation of successful affiliates won’t ask, ‘how do I rank for this keyword?’. They’ll ask: ‘why would someone choose to hear from me rather than an AI?’
That’s a much harder question. It’s also the only one that really matters. Traffic itself is becoming increasingly rented. Audience is owned. That’s a distinction I think our industry needs to take much more seriously.
Between tighter compliance, heavy operator fines, and stricter ad platform policies, certain markets are becoming nightmarish for performance marketers. Which emerging markets do you forecast becoming fundamentally unworkable for independent affiliates?
Rather than pointing to a specific country, I think the real risk lies in markets where regulation, platform policies, and operator requirements evolve at different speeds. Those are the environments that become extremely difficult for independent affiliates to navigate.
We’re seeing governments introduce stricter compliance frameworks, operators become increasingly cautious in response to regulatory pressure, and advertising platforms often enforce policies that go even further than the law itself.
The result is an ecosystem where affiliates are expected to meet multiple, sometimes conflicting, standards while having very little influence over the rules. Large operators can absorb that complexity with dedicated legal, compliance, and operational teams. Smaller affiliates often can’t.
I don’t believe regulation itself is the problem. Well-designed regulation creates healthier, more sustainable markets. The challenge is the growing cost of compliance. As that cost continues to rise, I expect further consolidation, with larger, better-capitalised affiliates gaining market share, while smaller players either specialise in defensible niches or struggle to compete. Going forward, success won’t simply depend on generating traffic. It will depend on having the operational sophistication to navigate an increasingly complex regulatory landscape.
For decades, affiliate marketing was built on capturing high-intent Google search traffic. With AI summaries consuming clicks and search intent, how are smart networks helping affiliates adapt to a world where top-of-funnel SEO traffic never fully recovers?
One of the biggest misconceptions I hear is that networks exist to connect affiliates with offers. That may have been enough ten years ago. It certainly isn’t enough today.
As customer acquisition becomes more fragmented, the role of a modern network is evolving from broker to strategic partner. Affiliates no longer need another marketplace listing thousands of offers. They need help understanding where value is being created, how to measure it, and how to scale it profitably.
At Rocahead, we’ve always believed the quality of an offer is determined by its economics, not its headline payout. A $300 CPA that barely converts is far less valuable than a $120 offer with exceptional EPC and predictable performance. As traffic acquisition becomes more competitive and AI compresses margins, affiliates can’t afford to optimise around vanity metrics. They need real commercial intelligence.
That is why I believe the next generation of affiliate networks will increasingly resemble technology companies. They’ll help affiliates interpret performance data, identify profitable audience segments, optimise landing pages, automate campaign distribution through APIs, test creatives faster, and build more resilient acquisition strategies across multiple channels.
Simply providing a tracking link is no longer a value proposition. The affiliates who succeed over the next decade won’t replace SEO with another single traffic source. They’ll build diversified acquisition engines that combine paid media, email, creator partnerships, communities, native advertising, social content, and first-party audiences.
Networks should play an active role in helping them make that transition. Ultimately, the industry’s challenge isn’t replacing Google. It’s reducing dependency on any single platform. Businesses that rely on one source of traffic will continue to experience the same cycle of disruption every time an algorithm changes. The strongest affiliates will be those who build businesses that own their customer relationships rather than rent them.
As browser privacy, cookie deprecation, and AI journeys scramble attribution tracking, the traditional CPA model is under stress. If CPA tracking never fully recovers, what payment structure or deal model will replace it to keep affiliates solvent?
The issue isn’t whether CPA survives. CPA remains one of the most elegant commercial models ever created because it aligns incentives between advertisers and affiliates. The real question is whether attribution remains reliable enough for CPA to function as intended.
For years, the industry operated under the assumption that if a customer converted, everyone could confidently identify who deserved credit. That assumption is becoming increasingly difficult to defend. Modern customer journeys involve multiple devices, multiple platforms, AI assistants, privacy protections, server-side tracking, browser restrictions, and increasingly fragmented user behaviour. Attribution is no longer a straightforward technical exercise. It’s becoming one of the industry’s greatest commercial challenges.
Running both an affiliate network and a tracking platform has reinforced that view for me. In many cases, advertisers and affiliates aren’t disagreeing because either side is acting in bad faith. They’re working with incomplete visibility into increasingly complex customer journeys. That creates friction, uncertainty, and ultimately weaker commercial relationships.
I don’t believe the future belongs to one universal payment model. It belongs to shared risk.
We’ll see more hybrid agreements that combine qualified lead payments, CPC, CPA, revenue share, retention bonuses, and quality incentives depending on the vertical and the maturity of the partnership. Affiliates need predictable cash flow to fund media buying.
Operators need confidence that they’re paying for genuine value. The commercial models that succeed will be those that balance both objectives rather than shifting all the risk to one side.
Perhaps more importantly, the companies that invest in transparent attribution, richer postback data, and better measurement will enjoy a significant competitive advantage. In an industry built on performance, trust increasingly depends on the quality of the data behind the transaction.
Every affiliate is using AI to scale content and media buying creative, but if everyone is using the same automated tools, margin compression is going to be brutal. How do you distinguish genuine competitive advantage from cheap scale in an AI-saturated ecosystem?
One of the most common statements I hear today is that AI levels the playing field. I actually think the opposite is true.
AI doesn’t eliminate competitive advantage. It exposes the people who never had one.
If every affiliate has access to the same language models, the same image generators, the same campaign automation, and the same creative workflows, then execution quickly becomes a commodity. The barrier to producing content, launching campaigns, or testing creatives has never been lower. That inevitably compresses margins for businesses whose only advantage was producing more than everyone else.
History gives us plenty of examples of this pattern. Every major technological shift has reduced the value of routine execution while increasing the value of strategy, judgment, and ownership. AI is no different.
The affiliates who continue to outperform won’t necessarily produce more content. They’ll make better decisions. They’ll have proprietary first-party data, stronger relationships with operators, faster experimentation cycles, deeper analytical capabilities, exclusive commercial agreements, and technology that competitors can’t easily replicate. AI simply amplifies those advantages.
That’s why I encourage affiliates to stop asking how AI can help them create more and start asking what they own that AI cannot reproduce. Do you own an audience? Do you own unique customer insights? Do you own technology? Do you own trust?
Those assets become more valuable, not less, in an AI-driven economy because they’re increasingly difficult to copy.
In my view, AI should be thought of as an extraordinary productivity multiplier rather than a competitive strategy. It accelerates execution, but it doesn’t replace vision. It makes great businesses faster and weak businesses more efficiently average. Ultimately, I don’t think AI will determine who wins the next decade of affiliate marketing. Ownership will.
Operators and ad platforms hold more leverage than ever – cutting commission rates, shortening cookie windows, or bringing acquisition entirely in-house. Are affiliates fighting a losing battle against platform dominance, or is there a way to regain leverage?
Every few years, our industry convinces itself that affiliates are losing relevance because a new platform, technology, or business model appears to hold all the power. We saw it when Google tightened its algorithms, when Facebook became a dominant acquisition channel, when Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency, and now we’re seeing it again with AI-powered search and increasingly sophisticated operator marketing teams.
The reality is more nuanced. Operators undoubtedly have more options today than they did a decade ago. Many have invested heavily in their own CRM capabilities, in-house media buying teams, first-party data strategies, and AI-driven customer acquisition. At the same time, advertising platforms continue to dictate the rules of engagement, often changing policies overnight. It’s understandable why some affiliates feel they’re being squeezed from both directions.
But I don’t believe this is a losing battle. I believe it’s forcing affiliates to redefine the value they bring.
The affiliates under pressure today are those competing on variables that operators can replicate internally, whether that’s buying the same traffic, using the same creative, or relying on the same automation tools. If your competitive advantage can be recreated by hiring another media buyer or licensing another AI platform, then your leverage will inevitably diminish.
The affiliates who remain indispensable will be those who own assets that are difficult, if not impossible, for operators to replicate. That could be a deeply engaged community, proprietary technology, unique first-party data, trusted personal brands, exclusive distribution partnerships, or expertise within a highly specialised audience. These are assets that compound over time and cannot simply be purchased off the shelf.
This is also why I believe the relationship between operators and affiliates needs to evolve. Too often, negotiations revolve around CPA, revenue share percentages, or cookie durations. Those metrics matter, but they don’t capture the real value of a partnership. The more productive conversations focus on incrementality, lifetime value, customer quality, and long-term commercial alignment.
Ultimately, leverage doesn’t come from negotiating harder. It comes from becoming genuinely difficult to replace. The affiliates who continue to thrive will be those who stop thinking like traffic suppliers and start behaving like strategic customer acquisition partners.
Many major operators are drastically pruning their affiliate portfolios to focus on ‘quality over quantity’. What makes an affiliate fundamentally uncuttable when an operator decides to drop 80% of their long-tail partners?
Every operator talks about quality over quantity, but quality is often misunderstood. It isn’t simply about delivering more players. It’s about delivering more value with less uncertainty.
When operators review their affiliate portfolios, they are no longer asking, ‘who sends us the most traffic?’ They’re asking much harder questions. Which partners consistently deliver customers with strong lifetime value? Which ones operate professionally? Which ones understand compliance? Which ones solve problems instead of creating them? And perhaps most importantly, which partners generate genuinely incremental business rather than intercepting customers who were already on their way to the brand?
That’s a significant shift. For years, many affiliates optimised for acquisition volume because that was the easiest metric to measure. Today, operators have become much more sophisticated in evaluating customer quality, retention, profitability, and attribution. As a result, affiliates need to think beyond clicks and first-time deposits. They need to understand the commercial objectives of the businesses they represent.
One lesson I’ve learnt from working on both the advertiser and network side is that operators remember reliability. They remember partners who communicate proactively, who adapt quickly to compliance changes, who understand the brand they’re promoting, and who consistently deliver what they promise. Trust has become a commercial asset in its own right.
Technology also plays an increasingly important role. Affiliates who can provide better reporting, cleaner attribution, transparent data, and deeper insights into campaign performance become much more valuable than those who simply generate traffic. The conversation shifts from ‘how many customers did you send?’, to ‘what have we learnt together about acquiring better customers?’.
No affiliate is truly immune from commercial decisions, but the hardest partners to replace are those whose contribution extends well beyond media buying. They become an extension of the operator’s growth strategy rather than another line in the affiliate platform.
That’s what makes an affiliate exceptionally difficult to cut.
Having transitioned from the advertiser side to launching Rocahead on the publisher/network side, what specific traits or tech capabilities do the top-performing 5% of affiliates possess today that keep them resilient against these ecosystem shocks?
Having spent my career on multiple sides of this industry, first managing affiliate programmes for advertisers, then building an affiliate network, and more recently developing tracking technology, I’ve had the opportunity to observe what consistently separates exceptional affiliates from everyone else.
Interestingly, it isn’t access to better traffic sources. It isn’t bigger budgets. And increasingly, it isn’t even access to better AI tools.
The top-performing affiliates think differently because they run their businesses like investment portfolios rather than campaigns.
Every decision is informed by data. They understand customer acquisition costs, approval rates, EPC, downstream revenue, conversion delays, lifetime value, and marginal profitability at a level that allows them to make faster, more confident decisions than their competitors.
They’re not chasing higher payouts. They’re optimising for stronger economics. Technically, they’re also investing far beyond the minimum required to operate. They understand server-to-server tracking, APIs, automation, routing, click-level reporting, landing page optimisation, creative testing, and increasingly, AI-assisted decision making. Even when they outsource development, they understand the underlying mechanics well enough to ask the right questions and identify problems before they become expensive.
But perhaps the biggest difference is psychological rather than technical. The best affiliates don’t think in campaigns. They think in systems.
They’re constantly asking themselves how they can reduce dependency on any single platform, advertiser, employee, or traffic source. They know that sustainable businesses are built by owning more of the value chain over time. That might mean building proprietary technology, growing first-party audiences, developing exclusive partnerships, or creating brands that customers actively seek out rather than discover by accident.
That’s why I often say that the future belongs to affiliates who own more and rent less. In my view, the top 5% are no longer simply affiliates. They’re sophisticated customer acquisition businesses with diversified distribution, proprietary infrastructure, and the operational discipline to adapt faster than the market around them.
And that, more than any individual technology or traffic source, is what makes them resilient.
What is one brutal prediction about the affiliate space that you believe deep down, but most of the industry is still in collective denial about?
If I had to make one prediction that I genuinely believe, it’s this: within the next decade, we will stop talking about affiliate marketing as a distinct industry.
That doesn’t mean performance partnerships disappear. Quite the opposite. I believe they become the dominant customer acquisition model. What changes is the label we use to describe them.
For years we’ve divided our industry into neat categories: affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, creator commerce, media buying, referral programmes, strategic partnerships, comparison sites, content publishers. Those distinctions made sense when each channel operated independently, with different technologies, commercial models, and skill sets.
Today, those boundaries are disappearing.
The same creator can negotiate affiliate commissions, fixed sponsorships, CPC campaigns, revenue share, and performance bonuses with the same brand. A sophisticated media buying team might build content that looks like a publisher, while a publisher increasingly relies on paid acquisition to scale distribution. AI agents are beginning to influence purchase decisions before a user ever visits a website. Attribution is moving beyond last-click, and commercial agreements are becoming far more flexible than traditional CPA or revenue share.
When you step back, it becomes clear that we’re no longer talking about separate industries. We’re talking about different expressions of the same discipline: customer acquisition.
I think many companies are still organised around yesterday’s definitions. They see themselves as SEO affiliates, influencer agencies, PPC specialists, or affiliate networks. Increasingly, those labels matter less than their ability to acquire profitable customers, measure value accurately, and build long-term commercial relationships.
That’s why I also believe the companies facing the greatest risk aren’t necessarily the smallest. They’re the ones whose business models depend on a single channel, a single platform, or a single commercial model. AI will accelerate that trend, but it isn’t creating it. It’s simply exposing it.
The businesses that thrive over the next decade will look remarkably different from the traditional affiliate companies we know today. They’ll own first-party audiences, invest heavily in technology and data, diversify acquisition across multiple channels, and build commercial partnerships that extend well beyond sending clicks.
Some may not even describe themselves as affiliates anymore, despite generating a significant share of their revenue through performance-based relationships.
If there’s one thing I think our industry is still underestimating, it’s that the future isn’t about becoming a better affiliate. It’s about becoming a better customer acquisition business.
Those who continue to define themselves by the channel they use will eventually find themselves constrained by it. Those who define themselves by the value they create will adapt, regardless of how technology, regulation, or consumer behaviour evolves.
As we’ve mentioned, things are changing and they are changing fast in the affiliate marketing landscape. So how can events like Affiliate Leaders Summit help educate marketers and why is it important for them to attend?
The pace of change in affiliate marketing has never been faster. AI, regulation, attribution, privacy, and evolving consumer behaviour are reshaping our industry almost monthly. In an environment like this, the biggest risk isn’t making the wrong decision, it’s making decisions based on outdated information.
That’s why events like Affiliate Leaders Summit are so valuable. They bring together operators, affiliates, networks, technology providers, and regulators to share real-world experiences, challenge conventional thinking, and discuss what’s actually working today, not what worked two years ago. The insights you gain in a single conversation can save months of trial and error.
For me personally, speaking at these events is my way of paying it forward. When I started in this industry, I would have loved to hear honest conversations from people who had already made the mistakes, navigated the challenges, and learnt the lessons the hard way. If I can be that person for someone else today, then every stage, every panel, and every conversation is worth it.
The Affiliate Leaders Summit is the global home of performance and affiliate marketing. Across three days, affiliates, operators, media companies and technology providers come together to discuss traffic generation, conversion optimisation, SEO, paid media and the commercial strategies shaping the future of affiliate marketing.
Co-located with SBC Summit at Feira Internacional de Lisboa and MEO Arena on 29 September-1 October. Get your tickets here.
