How to Tell if a Link Is an Amazon Affiliate Link

An Amazon affiliate link is an ordinary Amazon product link with an Associates tracking tag included in the web address. If you can see "?tag=" or "&tag=" followed by a short name anywhere in the address, the link is tagged for Amazon Associates tracking. The tag is often at the end, but it can also sit in the middle among other parameters.

Here is a normal Amazon link:

amazon.com/dp/B09XS7JWHH

And here is the same link with an affiliate tag on it:

amazon.com/dp/B09XS7JWHH?tag=creatorname-20

That "tag=creatorname-20" part is the whole thing. It tells Amazon which Associate account a qualifying purchase should be credited to. The product, the price and the page are exactly the same either way.

You do not have to open a link to inspect it.

• 01On a computer: hover your mouse over the link and read the address that appears in the bottom corner of the browser.
• 02On a phone: press and hold the link. A menu appears with the full address at the top.
• 03Anywhere: right-click or long-press and choose "Copy link address", then paste it somewhere you can read it.

Then look for "tag=" in what you copied. If it is there, the address carries an Amazon Associates tracking tag, which is what tells Amazon whose account a sale should be tracked to.

Plenty of Amazon links in YouTube descriptions do not look like Amazon links at all. They look like this:

amzn.to/3xK9mPq

These are Amazon short links, usually built with SiteStripe, the tool Amazon gives its Associates. Amazon states that the Associate ID and tracking ID are already included in a SiteStripe short link. They are simply not visible in the short address, so there is nothing in it to read.

To see what is really behind one, open it and look at the address bar once the page has loaded. The short link redirects to the full Amazon product page, and the tag is usually visible in that final address, sitting among several other parameters rather than at the end. One thing to keep straight: seeing a tag proves the link is tagged, but not seeing one does not prove the opposite, because Amazon does not require the ID to stay in the address after a click.

Amazon suggests this check to its own Associates, telling them to click the link and look for their tracking ID in the address, where it says the ID will "most often" appear. Just remember which way the check runs: it can confirm a tag, but it cannot rule one out. We covered the trade-off between the two link formats in short links versus full Amazon links.

Third-party shorteners such as bit.ly can also hide an Amazon destination. Open it and read where you land — though these can pass through extra redirects, so the final address does not always tell the whole story.

No. This is the question most people are really asking, so it is worth answering plainly.

You pay exactly the same price whether you use an affiliate link or go to Amazon directly. The commission comes out of Amazon’s side, not yours. The creator earns a small percentage, and the product costs you the same either way.

What you are entitled to is knowing about it. In the United States the FTC says a creator should disclose an affiliate relationship clearly and conspicuously, and that the closer the disclosure sits to the recommendation, the better; other countries have their own version of the same rule. Amazon separately requires its Associates to state that they earn from qualifying purchases. If you want the detail, we wrote about what creators are required to disclose.

If you are the creator rather than the viewer, this same check answers a much more expensive question: is my link still earning?

A link that has lost its tag can still open the correct product. The page loads normally, the viewer buys, and nothing looks wrong anywhere — but the purchase is no longer attributed to your Associates account. That is why a missing tag is so easy to miss. One way this happens is copying a product link straight from the browser address bar instead of building it with SiteStripe, since a plain product address has no tag in it. A tag can also be lost whenever a URL is edited or rewritten without preserving its parameters. What matters is the link you actually published: Amazon says your ID does not have to remain visible in the address after someone clicks, so judge the link in your description rather than the page it lands on.

Checking one link by eye is easy. Checking two hundred across four years of videos is not, and that is the point at which people stop doing it. AffiliScan opens every Amazon link in your video descriptions automatically, follows it to the real product, and flags the ones that are broken or no longer available — and on full links it also checks whether the affiliate tag is still there. A link you published without a tag in the first place is the one case you still have to catch by eye, using the check above. You can also read about the other reasons affiliate links quietly stop earning.

Identifying an affiliate link comes down to one habit: look at the address rather than the words. If an Amazon address contains "tag=", it is tagged for Associates tracking. If it is a short link, open it and check where you land — a tag in that address confirms it, and not seeing one leaves the question open rather than answering it.

As a viewer, that is all you need, and it costs you nothing either way. As a creator, it is the difference between a link that pays you and one that quietly does not — which is worth checking far more often than most people do.