How to Check if Your Amazon Affiliate Links Are Broken on YouTube

If you put Amazon affiliate links in your YouTube videos, your older videos are valuable assets. People still find them through search months or even years after you publish them, and the links in your descriptions keep earning commission — until they don’t.

Amazon products go out of stock, product listings get removed, brands update products or create new listings. Each one quietly turns a working affiliate link into a 404 or “currently unavailable” page. The viewer clicks, sees nothing they can buy, and leaves. You earn zero.

This guide covers why affiliate links break in the first place, how to audit them yourself, and how to automate the audit so it runs on a schedule and emails you the moment something breaks.

Most creators assume a broken affiliate link means the URL was typed wrong. In practice, the URL is fine — what changes is the Amazon page it points to. Three common reasons:

• 01The product was discontinued. Amazon removes the listing entirely. The product listing disappears and may return a 404 error or redirect to a search page. The link still loads, but viewers see nothing buyable.
• 02The product is “currently unavailable.” Amazon keeps the page but disables the Add to Cart button. Looks fine if you only check whether the URL loads. Earns nothing.
• 03The seller creates a new product listing with a different URL. Your video still points to the dead one.

You will not notice any of this from your Amazon Associates dashboard. Associates reports earnings, not link health. A dead link in a two-year-old video can quietly lose you commissions for months without you noticing.

For one or two videos, manual checking is fine. The process:

• 01Open your YouTube video in a private or incognito window so Amazon doesn’t personalize the page based on your account.
• 02Click each affiliate link in the description, one at a time.
• 03For each one, verify: the page loads, the product is still listed, the Buy button is enabled, and your affiliate tag is still present in the URL bar after Amazon opens the final product page.
• 04Note any failures and queue them for replacement.

For a creator with a 10-link tech review video, this takes about 15 minutes. For a channel with 50+ monetized videos with 10–20 links each, this becomes hours of repetitive checking with no easy way to track what is already fixed or broken — and no alerts when something new breaks.

The problem is, once you have more than a few videos, checking this manually becomes unrealistic.

AffiliScan is a free Chrome extension built specifically for this problem. Open a video, click Scan, and it scans the description, follows every Amazon link (including short amzn.to redirects), and reports back which ones are broken or unavailable.

AffiliScan lets you scan your YouTube videos automatically and get alerts when links break — so you don’t lose commissions silently.

A single-video scan takes about 30 seconds. You see each link’s status, the final Amazon product page it leads to, and a “Find replacement” button that searches Amazon for the same product so you can swap in a working link in two clicks.

For bulk auditing, add a YouTube channel or playlist to the dashboard. AffiliScan scans every video on a daily or weekly schedule and emails you a digest the moment something breaks. You stop discovering dead links by accident, and start fixing them within a day of the breakage.

Even if you only run AffiliScan once across your back catalog as a one-time audit, the result is usually surprising — most creators find at least one dead link in a meaningful share of their older monetized videos.

Broken affiliate links are a silent commission drain. They don’t show up in any dashboard, they accumulate over time, and the older your video catalog gets, the more of them you have.

Whether you check by hand for a handful of videos or set up automated monitoring across an entire channel, auditing your affiliate links is one of the most valuable maintenance tasks for any YouTube creator monetizing with Amazon Associates. The traffic to your old videos is already there. You’ve already earned it. Make sure every click can still buy something.