By Taylor Brisch, Director of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing has spent 30 years proving it can survive disruption.
Our team attended Rakuten Optimism 2026 earlier this week, where Rakuten Advertising CEO Amit Patel opened the conference by grounding the room in that history: 2026 marks 30 years since the launch of the Amazon Associates Program.
Since then, so much has changed: desktop to mobile, GDPR, cookie deprecation, and beyond. Each time, the channel adapted, rebuilt infrastructure, and came out stronger. Patel described affiliate’s share of monetized e-commerce today as “extremely reliable” and something the industry should be “extremely proud of.”
His argument for what comes next was sharper than a victory lap.
The Problem Isn’t That AI Is Taking Over. It’s That AI Skips the Relationship
Patel drew a distinction that should matter to every brand leader: there are purchases made with intent, and purchases that begin with discovery. You already know what you want in the first category. The second is where brand relationships are built.
AI tools are increasingly capable in the middle of the journey spanning comparison, evaluation, decision. But when AI converts directly, the consumer bypasses everything a brand has built around the visit. Loyalty programs, upsell architecture, the full relationship. One AI-generated result, no browsing, no brand exposure, no second chance.
Affiliate exists precisely in the discovery layer that AI currently skips. That makes it more valuable, not less.
The Channel’s Credibility Problem Has a Concrete Fix
One of affiliate’s persistent structural weaknesses is that it’s a conversion channel being evaluated in a world that still prices impressions. The attribution model works against it.
Rakuten is addressing this directly, committing to a measurement solution grounded in consistent data definitions and a model that reflects how the channel actually functions, to be piloted with select advertisers in partnership with impact.com.
Trust was also a theme throughout the event. Rakuten released an open-source browser extension SDK that codifies its code-of-conduct principles in reusable, transparent code, ensuring extensions only fire on active user engagement. The cleaner attribution this creates benefits the whole ecosystem. And in a moment that drew real applause in the room: Honey has elected to implement the same SDK and is returning to Rakuten Advertising.
The Alliance With impact.com Changes the Infrastructure Calculus
The headline of the conference was a strategic alliance between Rakuten Advertising and impact.com. Patel’s framing was direct: the goal is to build the most comprehensive performance marketing ecosystem the industry has seen. Rakuten brings scale, publisher relationships, managed services, and first-party consumer experiences. impact.com brings platform infrastructure, tracking and attribution capabilities, and one of the largest affiliate marketplaces in existence.
For brand leaders, the practical value is fewer integrations, better incrementality visibility, and the ability to reach consumers at the right moment in the purchase journey from one place.
Brand Equity Isn’t a Soft Metric Anymore. AI Is Making It a Targeting Input
One of the sharpest observations from the main stage panel introduced the concept of the “automation boundary”: as AI handles more friction in daily life, consumers will deliberately choose where to stop. For high-consideration purchases, anything with emotional weight or significant spend, that boundary tends to hold at the moment of transaction. Consumers still want to complete a purchase with a brand they trust.
That’s not nostalgia. It’s a signal AI systems are already learning to recognize. Brand equity built over decades is now functioning as an input to what gets recommended. The brands that invested in trust before AI arrived are better positioned in AI-driven discovery. The ones that didn’t will feel that gap compound.
What This Means for How You Think About the Channel
Affiliate is not a legacy tactic looking for relevance. It’s a discovery and conversion channel that operates precisely where AI-driven commerce creates its biggest blind spot, the moment before a consumer enters a brand ecosystem.
The Rakuten and impact.com alliance, the measurement commitment, the trust infrastructure are not defensive moves. They’re an industry building the foundation for what affiliate becomes over the next decade, at exactly the moment it matters most.
Brands that treat affiliate as an afterthought in the AI era will notice the cost of that decision sooner than they expect.
