How to find broken affiliate links on your YouTube channel

Your back catalog earns while you sleep — until the links inside it die. Products get delisted, sponsor campaigns end, shorteners get retired, and the videos keep collecting views that earn nothing. Here's how to find the damage, by hand or automatically.

Why broken links pile up on YouTube specifically

A blog post has one canonical page you can update; a YouTube channel has hundreds of videos, each with its own description, written over years. Most creators never revisit a description after upload day. Meanwhile the internet underneath those links keeps moving: Amazon products go out of stock or vanish, affiliate networks migrate their URL formats, sponsors let campaign domains lapse. The result is that your oldest, most-viewed videos — the ones still pulling search traffic — usually carry the most dead links.

The five ways affiliate links die (and which ones hide)

• Hard 404s and dead domains — the obvious kind. The page is gone and says so.
• Shortlink homepage dumps — the sneaky kind. A retired amzn.to or geni.us link often redirects to the retailer's homepage. The click "works," the viewer lands somewhere, and no error appears anywhere — but your product recommendation is gone and so is the commission.
• Missing affiliate tags — the invisible kind. An Amazon link without your tag= parameter loads the product page perfectly and pays you nothing.
• Out-of-stock and delisted products — the page renders normally with a quiet "currently unavailable" notice a human has to read to catch.
• Expired sponsor redirects — campaign URLs that once tracked your deal now point at parked domains or generic landing pages.

Note how few of these produce an error you can see. That's the core problem with checking links by clicking them: a browser is designed to get the viewer somewhere, which hides exactly the failures that cost you money.

The manual method (fine for small channels)

1. List your videos by lifetime views, highest first — dead links in high-traffic videos cost the most.
2. Open each description and copy every link into a spreadsheet.
3. Visit each link and check three things: does it land on the specific page you intended (not a homepage), is the product actually buyable, and — for Amazon — does the final URL contain tag=youryourtag?
4. Log the verdict, fix the worst offenders in YouTube Studio, and repeat every month or two.

This genuinely works for a channel with 20 videos. At 100+ videos with several links each, you're looking at a recurring afternoon of tab-juggling — and human eyes are bad at spotting a missing query parameter or a subtle homepage redirect at video #83.

The automatic method

A link checker does the same audit mechanically: follow every redirect chain, flag anything that 404s, times out, has certificate problems, lands on a bare homepage, or is missing its affiliate tag. For a single suspicious link, our free link checker does this in seconds with no signup. For a whole channel, Channel Workbench connects over read-only YouTube access, scans every description in your catalog, checks every link, and ranks the findings by severity — so a dead Amazon link in a 500k-view video outranks a stale redirect in a video nobody watches. Amazon stock and rating verification runs through Amazon's official API with your own free Associates credentials; we never scrape Amazon.

What to fix first

Not all broken links deserve equal urgency. Triage in this order: (1) missing affiliate tags in high-view videos — the traffic is already converting, you're just not being paid for it; (2) dead product links in your top-20 videos — replace with a current equivalent product; (3) sponsor links for expired deals — remove or annotate them to protect viewer trust; (4) everything else as time allows. Fix links in YouTube Studio, then re-check so regressions don't sneak back.

Related: Why Amazon affiliate links stop earning · The missing tag= problem · Channel Workbench vs AMZ Watcher