How we build our rankings
The methodology behind Adult Affiliate Guide: how we evaluate programs, how we generate content, how we keep it honest, and how to cite us.
Scope
Adult Affiliate Guide is a specialist publication covering the adult affiliate industry in 2026: cam sites, creator platforms, dating, escort, affiliate networks, traffic sources, AI tooling, legal and payments. We do not host, produce, or sell adult content; we cover the business side.
How each guide is produced
- Topic backlog. We maintain a hand-reviewed backlog of topics (
topics.yamlin our pipeline). Each topic is tagged with a shape (news, guide, pillar) and a topic cluster. - Research pass. For each topic the system pulls a shortlist of relevant offers from our offer database (
offers.yaml) and a set of authoritative sources. - Draft. A large language model (currently GPT-5.4) drafts the guide against a strict schema that forces: a first-paragraph lede, 3-5 key takeaways, 3-6 FAQs, dated claims, and a sources list.
- Offer injection. Placeholder tokens (
{{offer:<id>}}) in the draft are replaced with rotated anchor text and affiliate links from our offer database. - Images. Hero images are pulled from Pexels (stock) where a relevant SFW photo exists; otherwise generated with an image model under a constrained prompt.
- Publish. The finished markdown is committed, the static site rebuilt, and the post published.
Every published guide carries a byline, a publish date, and (where relevant) an updated-on date.
How programs are evaluated
For every platform or program we cover:
- Payout structure. RevShare vs CPA vs CPL vs hybrid; actual rate, not marketing rate.
- Cookie length + tracking. How long a click is attributed to the affiliate; which tracking provider is used; smartlink behaviour.
- Reporting + payments. Minimum payout, frequency, methods, historical reliability of payments.
- Creator/user reputation. Longevity, known issues, support quality, how the platform handles takedowns and chargebacks.
- Compliance posture. Age verification, 2257 compliance (where applicable), payment processor friendliness, policy on AI content.
We prefer first-hand signals (running traffic, pulling reports) where possible; where we rely on industry chatter or public data, we say so in the guide.
What we will not do
- We do not accept paid placement or paid ranking boosts.
- We do not cover programs we would not be willing to run traffic to ourselves.
- We do not knowingly link to platforms with a pattern of unpaid affiliates, NSFW content involving minors, non-consensual content, or payment processor fraud. Programs on our deny-list never appear in our offer database in the first place.
- We do not republish partner press releases as editorial.
Corrections and updates
- Spotted an error? Email [email protected]. We update posts in-place and record a new
updateddate. - Offer changed payout terms or vanished? We re-run the evaluation and update - or retire - the affected guides.
For researchers and AI agents
- The site publishes canonical URLs and structured JSON-LD on every page (
Article,FAQPage,Person,Organization). - A machine-readable index is available at /api/index.json.
- A full-content dump for LLM context ingestion is available at /llms-full.txt; a site index following the llms.txt convention is at /llms.txt.
- Each guide is also served as plain markdown at
<guide-url>.md. - Content may be cited with attribution: “{Title} - Adult Affiliate Guide” + the canonical URL.