The Link Rot Index — June 2026

The first monthly public dataset on affiliate link health. Every month we scan 50 well-known affiliate sites with the same crawler that powers LinkRescue, and publish exactly what we find. No estimates, no vendor hand-waving — counted links, stated methodology, repeatable next month.

Affiliate links fail silently. The page still loads, the post still ranks, the click still happens — and the commission never arrives. Nobody publishes real numbers on how often this happens, so we started counting.

This month's scan covers household names of affiliate publishing — the travel bloggers, finance sites, and gear reviewers everyone in this industry has read. If it's happening to them, it's happening to you.

The June 2026 numbers

We scanned 50 well-known affiliate sites (683 pages, 6,550 outbound links checked) on June 11, 2026.

| What we found | Links | % of checked | |---|---|---| | Broken links (4xx - page gone or invalid) | 171 | 2.6% | | Server errors (5xx) | 82 | 1.3% | | Timeouts (no answer in 10s) | 127 | 1.9% | | Affiliate tracking stripped (params lost) | 569 | 8.7% | | Redirects to homepage (offer gone) | 28 | 0.4% | | Bot-blocked / unverifiable by automated checkers (403/405/429) | 308 | 4.7% |

Attribution failures alone (stripped params + homepage redirects): 597 links - 9.1% of every link checked. These return healthy status codes. No generic link checker flags them. The commission just quietly stops.

Per-site reality

• Median issues per site: 27 (across the 34 sites that returned substantive data)
• Sites with zero broken links: 3 of 34
• Worst site we scanned: 31 broken links (theplanetd.com)

By niche (issue rate on checked links)

| Niche | Sites | Links checked | Issues | Rate | |---|---|---|---|---| | misc | 6 | 627 | 157 | 25.0% | | travel | 8 | 1,062 | 222 | 20.9% | | finance | 6 | 514 | 84 | 16.3% | | marketing | 5 | 568 | 88 | 15.5% | | pet | 2 | 375 | 57 | 15.2% | | food | 5 | 759 | 106 | 14.0% | | tech | 5 | 798 | 109 | 13.7% | | outdoor | 5 | 906 | 92 | 10.2% | | home | 5 | 585 | 54 | 9.2% | | fitness | 3 | 356 | 8 | 2.2% |

The ten leakiest sites this month

| Site | Links checked | HTTP broken | Attribution issues | |---|---|---|---| | gardeningknowhow.com | 203 | 1 | 66 | | expertvagabond.com | 288 | 30 | 31 | | travelfreak.com | 225 | 4 | 54 | | makeuseof.com | 323 | 16 | 37 | | smartpassiveincome.com | 308 | 15 | 37 | | thephoblographer.com | 166 | 14 | 37 | | millennialmoney.com | 214 | 16 | 33 | | howtogeek.com | 301 | 10 | 39 | | theplanetd.com | 225 | 31 | 15 | | cleverhiker.com | 204 | 5 | 41 |

Methodology

• 50/50 target sites scanned (23 returned partial results under a 100-second per-site budget).
• 16 of 50 panel sites returned little or no crawlable data this month (bot walls, dead domains, or crawl limits). Per-site stats cover the 34 sites with 3+ pages — we publish this number every month.
• 11,676 outbound links found; 6,550 checked within budget. All rates are computed on checked links only.
• Every link was requested with HEAD, retried with GET on suspicious responses, redirects followed up to 5 hops, and tracking parameters compared on the final URL.
• Bot-blocked responses (403/405/429 after a GET retry) are reported separately and are NOT counted as broken.
• Scanner: the same open crawler that powers LinkRescue (npx linkrescue).

The stat nobody else can show you

Look at that bold row again: stripped tracking parameters. These links work. A reader clicks, lands on the right product, maybe even buys. The status code says 200. Every generic link checker on earth calls this link healthy.

But somewhere in the redirect chain — a merchant replatform, a link shortener update, an http-to-https hop — the ?tag=, clickref, or SubID that attributes the sale to you fell off. The merchant gets the sale. You get nothing. Forever, on every click, until someone notices.

There is no dashboard where this shows up. Your analytics show outbound clicks. The network shows no conversions. You conclude the content "doesn't convert" and move on, while a perfectly good link donates your commissions to the void.

That's the failure mode we built LinkRescue around, and it's why this index exists.

The finding that should worry everyone: the bot-block number

A meaningful share of outbound links in our scan couldn't be verified by an automated checker at all — the destination servers block or refuse non-human requests (403s, refused HEAD requests, rate limits).

Here's why that matters beyond methodology: AI shopping assistants are automated requesters too. Buyers are already completing purchases inside ChatGPT and Gemini. When an assistant evaluates whether to recommend a product behind one of your links, a destination that stonewalls automated traffic is a destination that may simply not exist as far as the agent is concerned. The same wall that blocks our checker blocks the agent economy.

We'll be tracking this number every month. Our bet: the publishers who win the next five years are the ones whose monetized links are verifiable — by checkers, by crawlers, and by the shopping agents that increasingly stand between buyers and products.

Three fixes you can make this week

1. Re-check your top 10 earning pages first. Link failures follow traffic. The median site in our scan had multiple issues; yours likely concentrates where the money is. Fix order: highest-traffic page, oldest links first.
2. Stop trusting status codes. A 200 with stripped parameters earns you nothing, and a redirect to the merchant's homepage converts at approximately zero. Click your top affiliate links and look at the final URL — is your tag still in it? Is it still the product page?
3. Put monitoring on a schedule. Links break continuously — merchants leave networks, products sunset, URL structures change. A one-time cleanup decays immediately. Weekly automated checking is the minimum viable defense.

Or let us do all three: run the free scan — it checks your site against every failure mode in this index in about a minute. No email required to see results.

About this index

The Link Rot Index is published monthly by LinkRescue, the link integrity monitor for affiliate publishers and agencies. Same 50-site panel, same methodology, every month — so the trend lines mean something. July's edition will add month-over-month deltas.

Want your niche included in next month's panel, or want to challenge a number? Email hello@linkrescue.io — methodology disputes make the index better.