Affiliate Marketing
In one line
Affiliate marketing is the performance model where external partners promote your product and earn a commission on the sales they drive.
Going deeper
Affiliate marketing is the model where external partners — bloggers, publishers, influencers, coupon sites — promote your product and earn a pre-agreed commission on sales they drive. Paying for outcomes instead of impressions is the obvious appeal, and it makes ROI math straightforward.
The whole game in practice is attribution: tracking links, cookies, server-to-server postbacks. If you cannot tell where the click came from and who got the last touch, you end up in payout disputes constantly. Affiliate is won on measurement infrastructure more than on contract terms.
AI search is reshaping the channel in a quiet way. ChatGPT and Perplexity increasingly quote third-party review and comparison articles directly inside their answers, so affiliate publishers now double as citation surfaces — worth tracking alongside the usual revenue numbers.
Related terms
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising is the automated, auction-based way of buying and serving ad inventory in real time, replacing the manual insertion-order workflow.
MarketingDisplay Ad
Display ads are the image, video and HTML5 banners served across websites and apps — the oldest and still one of the broadest digital ad formats.
MarketingMartech Stack
A martech stack is the bundle of software a marketing team operates together to plan, execute and measure — typically anchored by CDP, CRM, automation and analytics.
GEO·AEOCitation Rate
Citation rate is the share of a defined prompt set in which an AI answer cites your brand or domain — the headline KPI of GEO.
GEO·AEOShare of Voice
Share of voice in AI search is the proportion of category-level answers in which your brand appears, compared with competitors.
How does your brand show up in AI answers?
Villion measures how your brand appears across ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews, then automates the work that lifts citation rate and share of voice.
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