Is my Amazon affiliate tag being stripped?

How a working link stops paying

An Amazon Associates link earns because of one query parameter — your tracking ID:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0EXAMPLE1?tag=yoursite-21

Strip ?tag=yoursite-21 and the link is byte-for-byte identical from the reader's point of view: it resolves, the product page loads, they can buy. Amazon just no longer knows the click was yours. That's why this failure is invisible — every conventional check (does the link work? does the page load?) passes.

The usual culprits, in rough order of how often we see them:

• Theme or plugin updates that rewrite outbound links — link cloakers, "SEO-friendly" URL cleaners, and table-of-contents plugins are repeat offenders.
• Caching and optimisation layers that normalise URLs and treat query strings as cruft to remove.
• Site migrations and bulk find-and-replace passes that mangle the query string or replace your tag with a stale one.
• Page builders that re-serialise content on save and drop parameters they don't recognise.

In every case the change ships silently, usually alongside something unrelated, and the first symptom is your Associates report drifting down while your traffic doesn't.

Check it yourself in five minutes

You don't need any tool for a spot check — just a browser. The key is to inspect the rendered HTML your readers receive, not what your CMS editor shows you, because the stripping usually happens between the two.

1. Open your highest-earning page in a browser — logged out, ideally in a private window, so you see what a reader sees.
2. View the page source: Ctrl+U on Windows/Linux, Cmd+Option+U on a Mac.
3. Search the source (Ctrl+F) for amazon. — this finds every full Amazon link. Short amzn.to redirects won't match, so search for amzn.to separately if you use them.
4. For each link, look at the query string. You should find tag= followed by your exact Associates tracking ID (e.g. yoursite-21). Missing tag=, an empty value, or an ID that isn't yours all mean that placement earns you nothing.
5. For amzn.to short links, the tag lives on the other side of a redirect — paste the link into a new tab and check the final URL you land on for tag=.
6. Repeat for a handful of pages, especially old posts and anything touched by a recent theme, plugin, or builder update.

If every placement carries your tag: good, that's the majority outcome. The catch is that this is a snapshot — the next plugin update can undo it, and hand-checking every Amazon link across a whole site, repeatedly, is exactly the kind of job nobody keeps up.

This happens to real sites — including ours

When we ran LinkWatch over our own affiliate site (pawpicks.uk, an Amazon Associates pet-products site we operate), it found 25 affiliate links across 9 distinct products with the tag stripped — links that had been working, and earning nothing, in published posts. Every one looked perfectly healthy in the browser. We built the detector because we got burnt by it ourselves.

Or let a robot do it — free scan

LinkWatch crawls your live pages exactly as they're served, parses every affiliate link (Amazon and other networks too), and flags any placement where the credit is missing. The first scan is free, needs no signup, and takes about a minute. Nothing to install, nothing to migrate — we read what's already there.

Frequently asked questions