Affiliate Marketing in 2026: What Changed for Publishers

If you run a content site, comparison site or niche blog that earns through affiliate links, 2026 did not bring one big shock. It brought a handful of changes that each matter on their own: Google now answers more queries itself, the third-party cookie deadline everyone planned for was cancelled, Google kept tightening how it treats low-value pages, and Danish enforcement against undisclosed advertising moved from warnings to police reports and court fines.

This article goes through each change with the primary sources, then ends with a short checklist. Everything here is dated September 2026; where a rule or product is still moving, that is said explicitly.

1. Search now answers first and links second

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode are the most visible change for publishers. At Google I/O 2026, Google said it was moving AI Mode to Gemini 3.5 Flash as the default model worldwide and that people can now ask a follow-up question directly from an AI Overview and continue the conversation in AI Mode. AI Mode had already been expanded to more than 200 countries and territories, including many in Europe.

The traffic effect is the part publishers feel. A Pew Research Center analysis of the browsing data of 900 U.S. adults, published in July 2025, found that users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits, versus 15% when no AI summary appeared. That is U.S. data from 2025, but it is an independent measurement rather than a vendor estimate, and it is worth comparing with your own analytics.

What Google itself says about optimising for these features is consistent and unexciting. Its documentation states there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and a May 2026 guide on generative AI features tells site owners they can ignore tactics like "chunking" content, creating llms.txt files or chasing inauthentic mentions. The same advice keeps coming back: unique, non-commodity content and a page that works well on every device.

What this means for affiliate content

A practical reading: short definitional pages ("what is a robot vacuum") are the easiest for an AI answer to replace, and they were never the pages that earned commission anyway. The pages that convert are the ones where a reader is choosing between specific products, prices and shops. Those depend on current data (price, stock, which shop has it) and on first-hand judgement, both of which are harder to summarise away. If you have to decide where to put writing time in 2026, put it there.

2. Google kept raising the bar on low-value pages

In March 2024 Google folded its helpful content system into its core ranking systems and introduced three spam policies that matter to affiliate sites: scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse and expired domain abuse. Google said at the time that the update, together with earlier work, reduced low-quality, unoriginal content in results by 40%.

Scaled content abuse is the one affiliate publishers should read closely, because Google's definition names practices that feed-driven sites are tempted by: generating many pages with generative AI without adding value, and scraping feeds or other content to create many pages, including through automated transformations such as synonymising or translating. A thousand auto-generated "best price on X" pages built straight from a product feed is exactly that pattern.

Google's status dashboard lists the ranking updates confirmed so far this year:

Site reputation abuse: a different rule inside the EEA

Site reputation abuse targets third-party pages published on a strong domain to borrow its ranking signals, a pattern that covered many coupon and "partner content" sections on news sites. Google's own documentation is explicit that affiliate links that are marked appropriately are not site reputation abuse. In August 2026 Google announced that, following discussions with the European Commission, it was lifting previous manual actions under this policy for results shown to users in the EEA from 30 August, and that manual actions outside the EEA no longer affect results shown inside it. If your audience is Danish, this is the version of the rule that applies to your search results.

FAQ rich results are gone

A smaller change with a direct effect on affiliate templates: Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in Search from 7 May 2026, with an exception for well-known, authoritative government or health sites. If your review template relied on FAQ markup to take up more space in the results, that effect has ended. A good FAQ can still help readers, but it is no longer a SERP feature for commercial sites.

3. The cookie deadline that never arrived

For years the working assumption in affiliate marketing was that Chrome would remove third-party cookies. That did not happen. In April 2025 Google said it would keep its current approach to third-party cookie choice in Chrome and would not roll out a new standalone prompt. In October 2025 it went further and announced the retirement of most Privacy Sandbox technologies, including the Attribution Reporting API, Topics and Protected Audience, citing low adoption. It is keeping CHIPS, FedCM and Private State Tokens, and is working on an interoperable attribution standard through the W3C.

That does not mean tracking got easier. Three things still cut into what networks can attribute:

• Consent. Under the Danish cookie order, non-essential cookies, including marketing and tracking cookies, need informed prior consent. When a visitor declines on the shop's site, the network may not be able to record the sale in the normal way.
• Browser protections. Safari's Private Browsing blocks known tracking query parameters in links using tracker lists, which can remove click identifiers before they reach the shop.
• Last-click rules. Both Partner-Ads and Adtraction credit the last affiliate click, so a visitor who clicks a coupon site after reading your review moves the commission.

Networks are responding in different ways. Partner-Ads documents a server-to-server tracking option for advertisers, where the order is reported from the shop's server rather than the visitor's browser. Adtraction has introduced what it calls "Fair tracking", which uses modelling based on consenting users to estimate conversions from non-consenting users, and can add a cost-per-click layer so partners are paid for traffic whose final sale cannot be tracked. Neither of these is something you switch on as a publisher, but they are worth asking about when you compare programmes.

4. Disclosure enforcement got real in Denmark

Danish marketing law has required advertising to be recognisable as advertising for a long time. What changed in 2024–2025 is how the Consumer Ombudsman (Forbrugerombudsmanden) enforces it against affiliate content:

• In October 2024 the Ombudsman announced police reports and warnings against influencers, including for affiliate links and discount codes that were not marked as advertising.
• On 21 February 2025 the Eastern High Court (Østre Landsret) fined an influencer 30,000 kroner for hidden advertising in 23 posts; tagging the brand was not considered clear enough marking.
• On 2 July 2025 the Ombudsman reported Obsidian Media ApS to the police. Its sites, which included forbrugsguiden.dk, forbruger-test.dk and bedste10.dk, earned through affiliate agreements, did not make clear that the content was advertising and, according to the Ombudsman, gave the false impression that products had been tested.

The Obsidian case matters most for publishers, because it is about ordinary affiliate review sites rather than influencers. The two lessons are the same as in the Ombudsman's earlier guidance: mark affiliate links as advertising where the reader sees them, and do not use words like "test" or "tested" unless you actually handled the product. The rules are covered in detail in our guide to affiliate disclosure rules in Denmark and the EU.

At EU level, the European Commission has announced a Digital Fairness Act for the fourth quarter of 2026, expected to address misleading marketing by social media influencers among other practices. It has not been published at the time of writing, so there is nothing concrete to comply with yet.

5. The channel itself is still growing

There is no reliable public figure for the size of the Danish affiliate market; the networks do not publish comparable numbers. The best recent benchmark from a nearby market is the UK: the Affiliate and Partnership Marketing Association's "State of the Affiliate Nation 2025" study reported that UK brands invested £1.7 billion in affiliate and partner marketing in 2024, up 9% on the year before, and earned on average £16 in revenue per £1 invested. It is a UK number and should be read as such, but it does not describe a channel in decline.

On the Nordic side, the networks' own figures show a large supply of programmes. Partner-Ads states that it has more than 1,500 partner programmes across Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and Adtraction describes over 7,000 partners working with more than 2,000 brands. For how they compare, see our Nordic network comparison.

What to do in the rest of 2026

1. Open the new generative AI report in Search Console and list which of your pages appear inside AI features. Compare that with your commission report to see which ones still send buyers.
2. Audit pages built from feeds. If a page is a product list with a heading and nothing you wrote, either add real comparison value or remove it; that pattern is what Google's scaled content abuse policy describes.
3. Put a clear advertising label next to every affiliate link or product box, not only in a footer or on an "about" page.
4. Remove "test" language from pages where you did not test the product.
5. Qualify affiliate links with rel="sponsored" (see affiliate links and SEO).
6. Keep prices and stock current. Partner-Ads' guidance asks affiliates who show prices to update them at least weekly; stale prices are both a trust problem and a compliance risk.
7. Spread your programmes across more than one network, so a single tracking or policy change does not cut off all your income.

Where AffiFeed fits

AffiFeed was built for the "keep it current" part of that list. It imports product feeds from Partner-Ads and Adtraction, lets you filter them down to the products you actually want to recommend, and gives you an embeddable product card or comparison widget whose links carry rel="sponsored". It does not write your reviews or test your products; that part is still yours. If you want to see what it does, the feature overview has the details.