The pipeline
How LinkWatch works
Zero migration is the whole idea: you change nothing about your site. We read what's already there.
1We crawl your live pages
Give us your URL and we fetch your sitemap and pages exactly as they're served to readers — rendered HTML, not your CMS database. Our crawler identifies itself as LinkWatchBot (details here), respects polite volumes, and reads a bounded number of pages per scan.
2We identify every affiliate link
Amazon Associates, Awin, CJ, Skimlinks, eBay Partner Network — each link is parsed for its network, merchant, product, and crucially whose credit it carries. The same product linked from ten pages is checked once, so merchants never see us hammering them.
3We health-check the canonical target
We check the actual product page, never the affiliate redirector. Redirector links set cookies and count clicks — health-checking them would pump fake clicks into your network dashboards and corrupt your stats. LinkWatch never does that, by design.
A single bad response never triggers an alert. A 429 or a captcha is recorded as inconclusive, not dead; a 404 must repeat across consecutive scans before it becomes a finding. The alert you get is one you can act on.
4You get one digest that matters
Weekly on Solo, daily on Portfolio. Confirmed money-losing findings (a stripped tag, a wrong affiliate ID) interrupt you once, immediately — then it's your move; we don't re-alarm you every day about the same problem. When everything is earning, you get a short green email saying exactly that.
CRITICAL ·
tag=missing on 2 placements/best-hiking-boots · confirmed on consecutive scans
Everything else is earning
the rest of your links checked clean this cycle