How Often Should You Check Your Amazon Affiliate Links?

For most YouTube creators, a good baseline is simple: check the Amazon affiliate links in your top-earning videos every week, scan your whole channel about once a month, and check every new video right after you publish it.

That single paragraph is the whole strategy. The rest of this guide explains why that schedule works, how to adjust it for your channel, and how to make the checking itself take minutes instead of days.

Amazon affiliate links themselves do not expire — but the products behind them change constantly. Items go out of stock, listings get removed, sellers disappear, and newer models replace older ones. When that happens, your link either leads to an error page or to a product nobody can buy.

And here is the important part: nothing notifies you. Amazon does not email you when a product you recommend dies. The link sits in your video description looking perfectly normal — while every click sends viewers to a dead end. The only way to know is to check.

• 01Weekly: your top 5–10 earning videos. These send most of your clicks, so a dead link here costs the most. A weekly check keeps the damage window small.
• 02Monthly: your full back catalog. Older videos still get steady search traffic, and their links are the most likely to have quietly died — some of those products launched years ago.
• 03After every upload: the new video, once, right after publishing. This catches copy-paste mistakes, stripped affiliate tags, and wrong links before the first wave of viewers arrives.
• 04After any big traffic spike: if an old video suddenly takes off (the YouTube algorithm loves doing this), check its links that day. A viral video with dead links is the most expensive kind of bad luck.

A proper check answers three questions for every Amazon link in the description:

• 01Does the page load — or does it hit a “page not found” error (a 404) or bounce to the Amazon homepage?
• 02Can the product actually be bought — or does the listing say “Currently unavailable” or out of stock?
• 03Is your affiliate tag still in the URL (the ?tag=yourname-20 part) — so the sale is credited to you?

Doing this by hand means opening every video, expanding the description, clicking every Amazon link, waiting for each page to load, and eyeballing what comes up. For a channel with five videos, that is a coffee break. For a channel with two hundred, it is a lost weekend — which is why most creators simply never do it.

Once your channel grows past a few dozen videos, checking by hand simply does not scale. That is where a link checker comes in. AffiliScan is a free Chrome extension that scans a YouTube video description and tests every Amazon link in it — in seconds. Each link comes back flagged as OK, broken, or unavailable, with a way to find replacement products for the dead ones. It can also scan an entire channel or playlist in one pass, which turns the monthly back-catalog check from a weekend project into a few minutes.

And if you would rather not remember any schedule at all: paid plans can re-scan your channels automatically every day or week and email you when a link breaks or a product becomes unavailable — so the checking happens even when you forget.

You do not need a complicated system. Top videos weekly, everything monthly, every new upload once — that schedule catches almost every dead link within days instead of months.

The habit matters more than the tool, but the tool is what makes the habit stick: when a full check takes minutes, you will actually do it. Either way, remember the golden rule of affiliate links — they never tell you when they die. Checking is how you find out on your terms, not your bank statement’s.