How do I monitor affiliate sites for compliance and brand misuse?

The problem

A company with hundreds of affiliates needs to monitor whether affiliate sites are still active, legitimate, and not impersonating the brand too closely or misleadingly. Inactive affiliates clutter your programme, inflate your reported partner count, and create dead ends for customers who find those sites through search.

Brand misuse creates legal and reputation risk. An affiliate that registers a domain mimicking your brand name, or one that uses redirect cloaking to send traffic to competitors, can damage customer trust and violate your programme terms. Without automated monitoring, these issues go undetected until a customer complains or a competitor notices.

How Unphurl solves it

Run your affiliate site list through Unphurl on a monthly schedule. The affiliate management scoring profile weights brand impersonation, domain health, and redirect behaviour. Your AI agents can automatically flag affiliates that need review, pause inactive ones, and escalate brand misuse for legal review.

Signals that matter for this use case

• – Parked means the affiliate's site is inactive. They're not driving traffic or representing your brand.
• – Brand impersonation detects affiliate domains that mimic your brand name too closely. Compliance and legal concern.
• – Redirects 5+ flags redirect cloaking, where an affiliate sends traffic through multiple hops (potentially to competitors).
• – TLD redirect change detects when an affiliate's domain redirects to a completely different TLD. Possible traffic hijacking.
• – Chain incomplete means the affiliate's site doesn't resolve. Dead affiliate.
• – Expiring soon flags affiliate domains about to lapse. The affiliate may be winding down.
• – SSL invalid means the affiliate's site has a broken certificate. Poor customer experience for your brand.
• – HTTP only signals an affiliate that hasn't maintained basic site security.

Suggested scoring profile

{
  "name": "affiliate-mgmt",
  "weights": {
    "parked": 25,
    "brand_impersonation": 25,
    "redirects_5": 20,
    "tld_redirect_change": 10,
    "chain_incomplete": 15,
    "expiring_soon": 10,
    "ssl_invalid": 10,
    "http_only": 10
  }
}

What a result looks like

Your monthly audit covers 300 affiliate sites. Unphurl analyses each one:

Inactive affiliates get paused automatically. Brand misuse cases get escalated to legal. Redirect cloaking gets flagged for programme review. Your affiliate programme stays clean, compliant, and focused on partners who are actually driving value.

Cost

Monthly batch of 200 to 500 affiliate sites is the typical pattern. Most affiliate domains get cached after the first audit, so subsequent months cost less. The Starter package covers monthly audits for most affiliate programmes.

Get started

# Audit an affiliate site
curl -X POST https://api.unphurl.com/v1/analyse \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://affiliate-partner.com",
    "profile": "affiliate-mgmt"
  }'