Threat or opportunity? Regardless of what you think, AI is here to stay and plans to disrupt affiliate marketing potentially more than many other industries.
The APMA this week announced the launch of its AI taskforce focused on projects the affiliate and partner marketing industry will work on in response to the challenges and opportunities it presents.
We also announced that two high profile AI experts in the UK affiliate scene would be leading the APMA’s AI efforts in 2026. So we asked them for their take on how the next year could pan out…
James Bentley leads AI strategy at Awin and works with teams across the business to advance research and development in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“Consumer discovery is shifting from keyword search to conversational AI, and this represents the most significant opportunity the affiliate industry has had to redefine its value since the rise of Google organic.
Quality content is becoming more important, not less. AI shopping agents lean heavily on expert reviews, creator content, and structured product data to inform their recommendations. The affiliate channel is uniquely positioned – it already connects the brands, publishers, and product data that AI platforms depend on. The opportunity is to make that role more visible and more valued.
Measurement
“To achieve that, the industry needs measurement that reflects how influence works in AI-driven journeys. The growth of AI Overviews in search demonstrates clear momentum, and an emerging stack of technologies is developing to address visibility and attribution.
These are still early days – tracking methodologies vary, coverage differs by query type, and no single solution yet provides the complete picture. That’s normal for a space evolving this quickly.
The opportunity is to build credibility by being transparent about what can be reliably measured today, while collaborating – including with the larger AI platforms – to establish fair, standardised systems that close the remaining gaps together.
New commercial models
“There is also a meaningful opportunity to strengthen publisher economics through commercial models that properly reward content influence, even where a traditional click cannot be captured. But this also requires addressing fundamentals.
Commission rejection on spurious grounds, opaque validation processes, and unpredictable payment timelines create cash flow uncertainty that disincentivises exactly the kind of new entrants the industry needs. If we expect technology-first businesses and developers to build on affiliate infrastructure, the commercial terms need to be dependable – not a source of risk.
A new generation of builders
“That connects directly to the wider opportunity: opening the industry to a new generation of builders. Better APIs, cleaner data feeds, and common technical infrastructure that enables engineers and startups to integrate with affiliate monetisation without navigating legacy complexity. The next wave of innovation is as likely to come from a developer building an AI-native shopping tool as from a content publisher – and the industry should be ready to power both.”
Alex Springer is Senior Director of AI Strategy and Partnerships at impact.com, as well as Director of OpenAttribution.org, a coalition of publishers, brands and technology providers working to establish attribution standards for AI content usage.
“In 2026 the affiliate industry needs to focus on visibility and transparency as key parts of AI infrastructure, not just a nice to have. You cannot do attribution in AI without knowing that a piece of content was retrieved, used and presented to a consumer.
Without that any attribution model is guesswork. While an important tool, deriving payment models from current AI visibility tools will struggle to prove ROI because they are inferring influence rather than observing it.
We need to be building the telemetry and standards that make deterministic measurement possible, and we need to be doing that in collaboration with AI platforms, not in opposition to them.
An agentic future
We are moving into an agentic future where AI systems act on behalf of consumers and brands. If all we do is optimise for someone else’s AI we hand control of our content, our brand image, and our audience engagement to Google and OpenAI. The affiliate ecosystem produces exactly what AI needs: trusted, current content that helps people make buying decisions. We must ensure that we are building infrastructure that keeps publishers and brands in control of how that content is used, not just making it available and hoping for the best.
Who controls the data?
That means thinking seriously about how brands and publishers control and license their own data, content and audience engagement through their own agents rather than just showing up in someone else’s agents and hoping they say nice things about us.
The APMA will regularly update on the projects and output from the AI Taskforce.
