This week’s Ask an SEO Question is a little different. The person wants to know how they can stay relevant and feel safe in their work thanks to AI replacing people. In addition to this question, someone at the Digital Marketing EU conference in Lisbon asked: “How do I pay affiliates to be able to use them for AIO/GEO?” during my presentation.
If you’re worried about losing your job to AI or feel like your role is less relevant, there’s always a chance that AI will replace you, but that might be less likely if you value yourself and use it as a booster rather than something that can replace you. This article is specifically aimed at the crossovers between affiliate marketing and SEO, with some touchpoints for PR and other channels.
First, here’s a quick definition of both to define roles specifically for this position:
- Affiliate marketing is a combination of content creators (influencers), bloggers, media company listings, in-depth guides and blog posts, and coupon and cashback sites. Each of them can be used as a source and reference by large language models for retrieving informationdetermine the sentiment, know what the brand does and generate a result.
- SEO is finding ways to gain visibility in search engines and now in LLM results/outputs. This is done through the context around a brand mention, websites and creators, including links that can be followed or crawled if it is an affiliate link or marked as sponsored to discover new pages, and to ensure the algorithm knows what the company does or sells, and to what types of audiences.
1. Be Aligned with Presenting Brand Benefits
We are already seeing personalized results in LLMs and AI insights (to some extent) based on what the system knows about the person. This is one of the reasons why a manager and an executive see different results for the same question about a company, and so does the executive assistant. Eventually, we can expect that the products that appear in a search result or output will be similar.
They could rely on:
- Estimated income level.
- Genre known by AI (especially in retail) based on purchasing habits and engagements.
- Location.
- Level of language, accent, slang and tone used in the question.
- Interactions during previous sessions.
By having an aligned strategy and knowing what the important brand talking points are, it’s a way to ensure that the LLM knows how to put yourself forward when your service or product is relevant to a user. If you don’t make it clear and concise who your audience and customer base is, it’s very likely that the LLM will ignore you and share a big brand or competitor that does.
For example, the user can ask which t-shirt suits them best without including price, designer, activity, age, gender, etc. The LLM or AIO will then look at the data they have on the customer and determine which brands are a match based on the information they have. In SEO, you would obtain a generic result, with machine learning and Augmented recovery generation (RAG), the system will evaluate a factual and more relevant response based on what it has from external sources combined with what it knows about the person.
SEOs can say, “Here’s why we’re not showing up,” and list several sales pitches that are relevant to a user. The affiliate manager can then take this into account and ask affiliates who are conducting reviews, creating videos, and creating lists to incorporate more of these selling points into the content to help the systems know who the product or service is for and build the knowledge base.
The above will likely help SEO because there are now more references to these attributes, and the affiliate manager can benefit because the content is more relevant to a reader. If that reader is in the audience demographic, they now know the product or service is right for them, and there’s a better reason to click and buy. In turn, the affiliate manager can direct SEO to combine the talking points that affiliates use to sell on the website and app experience, resulting in a more consistent click-to-page flow and should help increase conversions.
2. Update payment templates
The old affiliate model of paying a percentage or flat fee when a sale is made is outdated and has been around for over 10 years. This model doesn’t take into account a customer’s lifetime value, touchpoint attribution, or other conversions like email signups that turn into commission-free sales because that’s after the life of the cookie, and social media tracking that also doesn’t track affiliates as they convert.
More importantly, media buyers, link builders, AIO/GEO specialists and PR managers are now buying space on websites for their channels, but not committing to a method that works across multiple channels. They focus on their channels, so suddenly there are keyword-rich backlinks versus natural backlinks and with unnatural language, or branding statements and talking points versus the actual context of the feature and link.
This is where SEO and affiliate marketing can combine forces to set the brand up for long-term success:
- SEO can identify affiliates who consistently get sources in LLM and AI overviews and track the list.
- The affiliate manager can then relaunch the relationship with the partner and focus more on them.
- Sometimes partners are inactive or not generating revenue, so managers don’t pay attention.
- SEO and affiliate define a strategy which includes media fees for guaranteed natural language placement on source pages and for advertorials or inclusions in future news content.
- This is a paid game and will probably be something that hurts you in the future, but for now it seems to work well.
- If this is done organically and through real, normal, unbiased coverage (even with payment), it could be legitimate and not harm you. This will depend on honesty in sharing negative points, ways to improve, and full editorial discretion.
- Monitor and track progress.
The goal is to compensate the affiliate for their work while ensuring they continue to feature you because LLMs trust them as a source of information for your industry or niche. This can include Facebook groups, social media influencers, blogs, associations, white papers and studies, etc.
Updated payments and multiple options can lead to more people signing up for your affiliate program and more active promotions. In some of the affiliate manager groups I participate in, one of the biggest questions we get is how to convince our businesses or clients to update payment structures for modern times. This is the opportunity.
3. Creating Cross-Recruitment and Affiliate Links
Affiliate links are not backlinks; These are normally 307 redirects, with parameters or tracking set via JavaScript when exiting a site. Search engines know what affiliate links are and will not consider them a reliable source like a strong natural backlink. They can track them, so it’s a safe bet that if LLMs follow suit and identify what an organic mention is versus a paid placement, they will evaluate the website, the mention, the context and the value differently.
Affiliate managers can help clean up bad link profiles by inviting websites with harmful links to become affiliates. The pitch is simple: “You’re already connected to us, why not get paid for the work you’ve already done?” SEOs can stop losing backlinks and organic mentions by sharing their site lists with affiliate managers, so that affiliate managers don’t replace quality links with affiliate links.
In cases where the SEO cannot get coverage, they can invite the person to the affiliate program, where if they create a link from relevant content and have a person in the decision-making process, they can now make money. This keeps competitors out of the space and drives the user to your website when there may have been no brand mentions for anyone or any links before.
On top of that, the website is crawled and new pages are discovered if it is a new product, instead of waiting for a spider to find it or a manual crawl and index request.
Here’s How to Use AI to Stay Relevant
The two can do much more together to grow the business and the brand. Yes, AI can email links and make recommendations on content and placements, but it will likely be seen as AI and cause affiliates, creators, and publishers to ignore your brand.
Showing how, as a team, you increase your brand visibility, build a user base, and generate revenue while using AI to evaluate data and simplify processes is how you can secure your work because you’re scaling the business in ways that AI can’t, and using AI to be more efficient.
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Featured image: Paul Poetry/Search Engine Journal
