At PI LIVE Europe this year, Hello Partner’s Sol Wilkinson moderated a frank and honest debate on how AI search is reshaping affiliate marketing. He was joined by Peec AI’s Malte Landwehr, CJ’s Tom Saulsbury-Hunter, and Acceleration Partners’ Ben Norton.
The panel clashed in their perspectives.
On one side, we heard optimism. The idea that AI search is simply another interface. If affiliates become the source of truth – as they are already doing – they’ll earn commission in new ways. LLMs, in this view, are just the next evolution of how people look for products, and affiliate still has a (very big) role to play here.
But the opposing view hit hard.
We heard that clicks in AI modes are already 80–90% lower, that the open-web model breaks when users never leave the interface, and that LLMs have zero incentive to credit the sites they summarise.
Malte Landwehr didn’t mince words: “I think this whole AI search topic is fundamentally, catastrophically bad for affiliate marketing as it works right now.”
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