91̽»¨

Anthony Clements, UK and DACH Country Manager at , is a seasoned performance marketing leader with nearly 20 years’ experience. Formerly at Adtraction and Awin, he drives growth, partnerships, and go-to-market strategies across Europe, helping brands scale customer acquisition, revenue, and trust through innovative partnership marketing.

How Has The Sudden Rise Of AI Impacted Brand Discovery And Search?

It’s probably the hottest topic in our industry at the moment. For us, AI comes in two parts. One is inside the platform itself, helping with the standard stuff like managing your publisher account, pulling links, reports, AI summaries. We’re leading the way in building an AI and MCP-driven partnerships platform.

The more important side is how AI is changing discovery on the internet. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and there have been four genuinely transformational moments for our industry: search, mobile, social, and now AI. It’s changing the way people search for things.

A lot of the partners we work with have traditionally got their traffic from search, and that traffic is changing – declining, in many cases. Not because people aren’t searching. I’m very clear on that. People en masse aren’t using ChatGPT to ask “what are the best backpacks for commuting this year?” Those commerce searches are still going through Google. The challenge is that the AI overview pushes all the content down, makes it far less relevant, and no one’s clicking through to the websites, finding their backpack, going to the advertiser and making the purchase. That transactional customer journey we’ve relied on for 20 years is being fundamentally disrupted.

How Has That Affected Affiliate Networks And The Brands Relying On SEO?

It’s actually going to affect things very positively. Look at what social did for our industry: when Instagram was acquired in 2013, it went from 3 million users to 30 million in six months, and suddenly we had loads of partnership opportunities that didn’t exist before. AI-led discovery is doing something similar.

Some partners reliant on search traffic are seeing it decline, and they’re having to look at new ways to generate their audiences. But there are also partners really owning the AI discovery space, their content being referenced heavily in AI overviews, cited by Claude and ChatGPT. That move from the “search era” to the “answer era” is happening, and partnerships are going to be fundamental to it.

Third-party content being cited, LLMs looking for trusted sources to properly answer prompts – that’s going to make partnerships more important than they were even during the peak search years. In 2016, search wasn’t trying to answer your question, it was giving you back content relevant to your question. LLMs are trying to answer. Trusted, cited third-party content becomes really important, and that creates a lot of opportunity.

LLMs Are Great For Discovery, But For Purchase Intent – Especially Higher-Ticker Buys – People Still Come Back To Search. How Do You Bridge That?

The concept of attributing across all these different ways people search is still very click-driven right now.

Our job at Impact, and at platforms like ours, is to surface that value. We did it well with clicks over the last five years, moving affiliate attribution away from last-click into multi-touch and first-touch models. But there was still a click. Now there isn’t. Engagement has to be measured algorithmically – based on citations, sources and mentions – building a view of how relevant a piece of content or a social partner is to LLM prompt responses in a given category, then feeding that back into the platform so brands can pay on it. We’re trying to do that in as accurate and deterministic a way as possible.

There’s a scramble to solve this at the moment, but it doesn’t need to be a scramble. It’ll be solved gradually and strategically by technology. Right now, if you’re an advertiser inside Impact, you can set up prompt searches in your categories and see which partners are driving the most visibility in LLMs for those prompts. If a publisher like 91̽»¨ is doing that, we’ll showcase it and give the brand a way to work with them, currently through fixed fees and models outside our traditional CPA. That reward mechanism will get more intelligent over time.

Some companies are rushing and making probabilistic guesses about relevance, which doesn’t cut much ice with advertisers. Advertisers want a deterministic view of influence before they spend real money on content placement.

How Does This Play Out Differently Across Industries – E-commerce Vs Services?

LLM discovery is more instrumental in some sectors than others. Travel and finance, definitely. In pure e-commerce it’s less so right now. It’s more of an informational journey than a transactional one.

If you’re searching for a commercial litigation lawyer in London on Google, you’d type “commercial litigation lawyers London.” On an LLM, you’d describe the whole dispute, get a response, refine it, go back and forth, and eventually reach an answer that informs your traditional search. E-commerce is different, unless it’s a high-ticket item, you’re not going to purchase on an LLM.

But actually, when someone does their research on an LLM and then goes straight to a purchase, it’s much easier for us to understand the influence – even without a click – than if they leave the LLM, get influenced somewhere else by an offer, then land on the e-commerce site. Marketing attribution becomes more important the more elongated the discovery journey is. LLMs are elongating that journey right now, though I think it’ll narrow again as people build trust in what they find. The fewer discovery touchpoints there are, the more accurate the attribution.

Which Affiliate Areas Are Leveraging AI Search And Discoverability Best Right Now?

Traditional content partnerships are the most important currently in LLM visibility. If a brand has both a strong large-content publisher strategy and a smaller, more niche content strategy, they’ll generally do well in the LLM space, because that’s the content LLMs want.

YouTube content matters too, especially in markets like finance and travel. Reddit content is significant, though it’s not really something brands can influence directly, though there are companies working in that space.

On the offer side, brands need to understand that a lot of offer sites block LLMs and scrapers. When you’re thinking about what a good partnership looks like in the LLM space, it’s worth knowing which companies block scrapers and which don’t. The offer space has been one of the most disrupted by LLMs because of the way people now search for deals.

Vertical-wise, travel is where we’ve seen the most interesting AI-first partnership propositions – specific AI-driven platforms where you can construct and book holidays. It’s adding real value to consumers in those complicated, long-form, research-based purchase journeys.