Affiliate marketing has long been measured in terms of clicks, conversions, and sales revenue. While these are important metrics, they only tell part of the story. In standard network reporting, brands often see which publishers drive results, but not the exact content pages where their links appear. This creates a blind spot — one that becomes critical in the age of generative AI. 

Guest articles and thought leadership pieces have long been staples of brand building. In the era of generative AI, their role is shifting: these contributions don’t just reach human readers, they also help shape the datasets that AI tools rely on when answering consumer questions. 

Influencer marketing is well-established as a driver of awareness and consumer trust. But as generative AI becomes a key layer of product discovery, there’s a new question to ask: do influencer posts, blogs, and video transcripts influence what AI systems say about your brand? 

Affiliate publishers don’t just shape how your brand is seen — they also influence which competitors dominate consumer consideration and, increasingly, generative AI answers. By analysing competitor affiliate coverage, brands can uncover gaps, opportunities, and pressure points in their own visibility strategy. 

Affiliate marketing is often described as a channel in its own right. In reality, it’s better understood as the buying mechanism that underpins much of today’s content partnerships — the connective threads in a wider web. From top-tier editorial publishers to niche comparison sites, affiliate models enable brands to secure visibility in articles that shape both consumer behaviour and generative AI outputs.

Affiliate marketing is often described as a channel in its own right. In reality, it’s better understood as the buying mechanism that underpins much of today’s content partnerships. From top-tier editorial publishers to niche comparison sites, affiliate models enable brands to secure visibility in articles that shape both consumer behaviour and generative AI outputs. 

Affiliate publishers; from large review sites to niche blogs have become one of the most influential channels in consumer decision-making. They publish buying guides, comparison tables, and “best of” lists that shoppers use to evaluate products. Increasingly, this content is not only shaping human choices but also fuelling the recommendations made by generative AI platforms. 

For years, getting cited was crucial to SEO rankings: how many people clicked through to your site. But in the age of generative AI, crucial becomes an understatement. Success is no longer only about traffic. It’s about being cited

Q4 is the most critical time of year for retail brands, with Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the festive shopping period driving a huge share of annual revenue. To cut through the noise and convert demand at scale, brands need a smart, full-funnel approach. Recent insights from Fospha show exactly what separates the top performers from the rest.

Reputation currency refers to the authority and reliability your brand earns through third-party validation. This can come from editorial coverage, analyst reports, awards, or inclusion in trusted “best of” lists

Generative AI platforms lean heavily on external sources to answer user queries. Research from Muck Rack (2025) shows that in some cases, as much as 96% of citations in AI-generated responses come from editorial content, not brand websites, not ads, and not press releases. For brands, this makes earned media more important than ever. 

When consumers ask questions through generative AI tools, they often receive a single, synthesised answer. In practice, this makes platforms like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Bing Chat the new narrators of brand stories. The way they describe your products or services depends on the sources they can access, not necessarily on what you publish yourself. 

Search is no longer about driving clicks to websites. Increasingly, consumers find answers directly on the platform they’re using whether Google, Bing, or an AI assistant like ChatGPT. This “zero-click” behaviour is reshaping how brands need to think about visibility. 

Generative AI has moved rapidly from novelty to mainstream. ChatGPT alone reached around 700 million weekly active users worldwide by mid-2025, making it one of the fastest-adopted technologies in history (Backlinko, 2025). In the US, nearly a quarter of adults had already tried ChatGPT by early 2024 (Pew Research, 2024).  For brands, this represents a fundamental shift in how consumers discover and process information. Instead of scanning through multiple search results, use

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