Is Affiliate & Influencer your secret weapon in the AI Battle?

Executive Summary

• Is Affiliate & Influencer your secret weapon in the AI Battle?

• Countdown to Affiliate Summit East in New York

• Speaking at PartnerStack in New York

• Big AI updates

• The Real Cost of Turning off Ads

• RBL is Hiring

• Join us to talk about MMM (Media Mix Modeling) and Affiliate Marketing next Thursday live on LinkedIn.

Can Affiliates and Influencers Get You into Answer Engines like ChatGPT?

Yes.

We are regularly seeing examples of it, and we are working with brands to improve their traffic from Chat GPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Copilot, and Claude.

If you're looking for help and want to explore affiliate and influencer marketing, please don't hesitate to message me. We can help you manage your affiliate and influencer program in a more innovative way to improve and increase traffic from Answer Engines and LLMs.

Multiple experts in SEO are validating this, as we will see in the information below.

🗽Affiliate Summit East is just 3 weeks away.

This year will be a great time to gather in New York (as usual) to connect the best brands with the best partners and influencers.

20% discount for YOU, the lovely RBL Flywheel subscriber: (or use the code RBL20 at checkout when mentioning on the pod) Register Here for Affiliate Summit

Brand pass link for CEL (Creator Economy Live) if you are registering as a brand.

Discount code for CEL (Creator Economy Live) RBL15 – Register here for Creator Economy Live if you are not a brand.

We couldn’t be more excited to join you at Affiliate Summit East on August 4–5... 

... and (drumroll, please 🥁) ... the agenda has OFFICIALLY dropped! 

The event will feature brands like Free People, Yahoo, Loop Earplugs, KashKick, Bankrate, New Balance, CNN, Nespresso USA, with some informative sessions like:

How Brand Building Unlocks New Customer Acquisition and How to Measure It – With Preston Rutherford, Founder at Chubbies and Marathon

Measuring the Incrementality of Influencer Marketing – With David Mirshahi, Partnerships & Affiliate Lead at New Balance, Georgina Whalen, Director of Influencer, Affiliate & Social at TrueLearn, Molly Cole, Influencer Marketing Manager at Epic Gardening, and Navi Singh, CEO at Sohva

🔈️ I am speaking at PartnerStack’s Stack’d Connect

🤖 Is Agency the way with AI?

Are people with grit, determination, curiosity, and agency going to win even more now?

Great piece to consider when so many powerful tools are available:

How to Become AI Native

The Time is NOW for Affiliate & Influencer marketing

🤑 The rising costs of Meta and Google paid ads...

🔎 The decline of organic traffic and the rise of zero-click search results...

📊 The importance of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and improving exposure in Chat GPT, Gemini, CoPilot, Grok, and Perplexity

‼️ This new reality makes affiliate, influencer, and partner marketing a necessity.
(Yes, affiliate and influencer marketing can improve your position in LLMs 😉)

It is no longer "nice to have."

Affiliate and influencer marketing is now a MUST-HAVE.

This piece by Kevin Indig supports my point…

You need to garner numerous positive mentions of your brand, and affiliate marketing is a highly effective way to achieve this.

What Happens When You Turn Off Ads?

Good news for smart marketers like us.

Based on a data-driven study of 365 brands across 22 Consumer Packaged Goods categories, it appears to be a bad idea to “go dark” or stop your ads.

They saw a steady decline in market share the longer a brand stayed dark:

😐️ Down 10% after 1 year

😧 Down 20% after 2 years

😠 Down 28% after 3 years

🫠 Down 30% after 4 years

Is ChatGPT Coming for Shopping?

Native Checkout: OpenAI will integrate a checkout system into ChatGPT, enabling users to complete purchases directly within the platform. Merchants will pay OpenAI a commission for every order processed through this feature.

Current Status: Product links in ChatGPT currently direct users to external retailers; the new system will facilitate transactions within the app. Early versions have been shown to brands for feedback, and financial negotiations are underway.

Shopify Partnership: Shopify’s backend checkout technology, already powering TikTok shopping, will be integrated, streamlining the buying journey inside ChatGPT.

Scale and Market Impact: OpenAI is valued at approximately $300 billion but remains loss-making. This commerce push is designed to capture new revenue streams from its vast free-user population—a segment that has been previously untapped for monetization.

Competitive Threat: OpenAI’s move sharpens its rivalry with Google as chatbots become a new frontier for product discovery and shopping, potentially disrupting traditional paid search models

Product Recommendations: ChatGPT suggestions are generated based on query relevance, user memory, and real-world preferences, rather than paid rankings. Merchant listings are determined by third-party data, rather than by price or shipping, although this may change in the future.

Rise of “AIO”: Brands and marketers are already adapting, working to optimize their product visibility within ChatGPT through “AIO” (AI Optimization), akin to SEO for search engines

Advertising Outlook: OpenAI insists it won’t accept payments to alter product placement but may charge a small affiliate fee (suggested 2%) for purchases made via ChatGPT. While OpenAI has not formally announced advertising plans, leadership says options remain under consideration for the future.

Perplexity Launched Comet

A very impressive browser that enables you to direct agents to take actions on your behalf, such as scheduling meetings, sending emails, filling out forms, making purchases, and using voice commands for hands-free operation.

Comet includes a native ad blocker and provides full support for importing Chrome extensions, as well as marking emails as read or crafting automatic replies in Gmail or Outlook.

I enjoyed using it and using it for a percentage of my browsing. Some cool use cases:

• Comparing shipping speeds and prices across retailers before making a purchase

• Summarizing a multi-tab research session and sharing the results as a single report or note

• Quickly digesting long videos or podcasts with AI-generated episode recaps

• Getting voice answers to questions about your calendar, documents, or presentations, and then letting the assistant improve these documents automatically.

RBL is Hiring!

If you know someone with impressive Affiliate Marketing chops, data-driven, agency experience, and an enthusiasm for B2B SaaS, message me.

Join me and some industry experts to talk about how we can bridge the gap between Media Mix Modeling (MMM) and Affiliate Marketing.

🗓 When: July 24, 2025
⏰ Time: 1 pm ET / 12 pm CST / 10 am PT
📍 Where: LinkedIn Live

Summary

• Is Affiliate & Influencer your secret weapon in the AI Battle? YES! 🎯 

• Countdown to Affiliate Summit East in New York, use code RBL20 to save 🗽 

• Speaking at PartnerStack in New York 🤠 

• Big AI updates 🤖 

• The Real Cost of Turning off Ads 🤑 

• RBL is Hiring 💼 

• Join us to talk about MMM (Media Mix Modeling) and Affiliate Marketing next Thursday live on LinkedIn. 📊