How RecruitAffiliates.ai finds websites

A scan is RecruitAffiliates.ai searching for people who already write about products like yours. This page covers the website half: blogs, review sites and newsletters with a site. YouTube and podcasts have their own searches and show up in the same list. Podcasts are near the end.

What a scan searches for

You gave RecruitAffiliates.ai two lists when you set up your brand: your competitors and your keywords. A scan turns them into Google searches, in your brand's country and language:

• Each keyword, as you wrote it.
• Five searches for each competitor, up to 15 competitors. They're "Name review", "Name alternatives", "Name vs", "Name affiliate program" and "Name coupon". Each ends with the word your keywords share most. Let's say your keywords are about affiliate software and one competitor is called Impact. The search is "Impact review affiliate", not "Impact review", so it finds reviews of the platform and not of a power tool.
• Four topic searches built from your keywords, like "best meditation blogs", "meditation newsletter", "meditation podcast" and "meditation creator". They find creators who don't promote anyone yet.

Then RecruitAffiliates.ai asks who already links to each competitor. See Sites that link to your competitors.

Your first scan makes at most 40 website searches. A weekly scan makes up to 100. Keywords go first. Then come a "review" search for every competitor and the four topic searches, and the "vs", "alternatives", "coupon" and "affiliate program" searches go last. Review searches find the most affiliates, so when the searches run out, the last kinds are the ones a scan leaves out. Let's say you listed ten keywords and 15 competitors. Your first scan makes 10 keyword searches, 15 review searches, 4 topic searches and 11 "vs" searches. It keeps the top 20 results from each, treats every site that ranks as a candidate, and keeps the pages that ranked as its evidence.

Your first scan starts as soon as you've saved your competitors and keywords, so you can write your offer while it runs. Website, YouTube and podcast searches run at the same time. None of them waits. A finished source can add its results while another source is still working.

A scan takes up to five minutes. Whatever each source found by then is kept. Anything slower is dropped, and it can't cost you anything. If one source finishes and another times out, RecruitAffiliates.ai keeps the finished results and shows a warning for the source that stopped. A website source short of time stops 20 seconds early, skips any check it hasn't started, and keeps every row it already found and checked. You still get rows.

One site, one row

A site is identified by its domain. www.example.com, blog.example.com and example.com/reviews are all example.com, because one company with one inbox owns them.

There's one exception. Some hosts rent a subdomain to anyone, like Substack or GitHub Pages. There, jane.substack.com and joe.substack.com are two different people, so each gets its own row.

When next week's scan finds the same site again, its row is updated with the new pages. You never get a duplicate. Anything you did to the row stays: saved, hidden, notes, the stage it's in. A page that hasn't ranked for 30 days drops off the row.

What gets left out

Most sites a scan finds aren't people you'd email. So RecruitAffiliates.ai sorts them before you see the list, and it tells you what it did with each one, because a tool that quietly drops results is a tool you can't check.

Never listed at all:

• Your own site, and the competitors you named.
• Anyone who's already a partner in your AffiliateRail program, and anyone in a list you uploaded.
• Big platforms that rank for everything: social networks, app stores, software marketplaces, national news sites.

Listed, but hidden. These are written to your account with the reason. You can see them under Hidden and bring any of them back:

Sometimes the AI's one-line reason says more than its label. Let's say it labels a site independent but writes "marketing agency publishing brand visibility advice". RecruitAffiliates.ai goes by the words and hides the row as an agency. A hedge, like "agency/creator", keeps it.

The same two-answer rule covers who owns a YouTube channel. Say the AI thinks a channel sells its own product, is off topic, or is a directory or an agency. Before we hide it, we ask again with the channels in a different order. If the two answers disagree, the channel shows.

Under each hidden row you'll see which reason it was and what RecruitAffiliates.ai saw, in a few words. A row you hid yourself says so.

A later scan can hide a row too. When RecruitAffiliates.ai's rules get better, the next scan checks the rows it finds again and hides any that now fail, with the reason. It never hides a row you saved, a row you hid yourself, or a row you brought back.

Why hide vendors? We ran three test scans on real brands before building this, and 30 of the 40 top-ranked websites sold software in the same category. They rank because they write comparison pages about each other. Hide them, and the reviewers you want move up.

RecruitAffiliates.ai makes the vendor call in two ways. First it reads the evidence: a site that compares itself to a rival ("Acme vs Rival" on acme.com) is a vendor. Then an AI model reads the domain, the page titles and the short description Google shows under each one, with your competitors' names and domains beside them, and says who owns the site. YouTube channels get the same check: a company's own channel is hidden the same way. The AI only sorts. It never writes a number, a rate or a claim about a person. If a call is wrong, bring the row back from Hidden and it stays back.

RecruitAffiliates.ai also reads the home page of each website it shows, once, for free. This is every website row, not only the ones with a competitor's link. Two signs hide a site as a vendor. One is a home page that sells in your category, with a pricing page and a trial or an app. The other is a web app with a pricing page. A third sign, a product named for your category, hides a site only when every page we found on it is a blog post. That keeps a reviewer who sells an "Affiliate marketing course" on the list. It also keeps a creator whose shop links products by your brand or a competitor, like a skincare creator's picks. A shop stocking them isn't selling a rival product of its own.

Three rules don't need the AI at all, so they still work on a day it doesn't answer:

• A competitor's own site. impact.com is hidden when you named Impact, even if you never gave its domain. A site that only shares a word, like impactplus.com, isn't.
• The platform your keyword names. If one of your keywords is "stripe integration", stripe.com is the platform, not a reviewer. It's hidden as a platform.
• Glossary pages. A site where only /glossary/ pages rank is a software company's own marketing.

Two more read what you sell, from the business type on your brand. Neither runs for a software brand.

• A podcast that only matched a name. Let's say a rival is called Buffy. A show about Buffy the Vampire Slayer can match it through one episode. When a show matched just one episode, and nothing on it mentions what you sell, it's hidden as off topic.
• A hiring firm, for a service business. If you sell a service, your rivals' review pages are often written by staffing firms selling their own hiring. A site whose name says hire, talent, recruit, outsource or staffing is hidden as a vendor.

If the AI fails to answer for a batch of sites, RecruitAffiliates.ai asks it once more before it gives up.

Coupon and deals sites are not hidden. They stay in the list with a low score.

The two numbers on a website row

If the estimate isn't available, the row says monthly visits not known. RecruitAffiliates.ai doesn't guess. It never shows a 0 for a number nobody measured, because a 0 reads like a count of zero visits, and you'd be right to call that false. The profile names the source and the date of the estimate.

A website row has no country. Why? The search runs in your country, so all it can tell us is yours. So country filters and the country boost apply to YouTube only. Save a website, though, and its profile shows which countries its search traffic comes from, as What a save reads explains.

Each page on the row has a type: review, comparison, alternatives, listicle, guide or landing page. A listicle is a ranked list like "7 best screen recorders". A landing page is a company's own product or pricing page.

RecruitAffiliates.ai also spots two finer kinds of page. An affiliate program page is someone writing about one competitor's affiliate program, like "Tolt affiliate program review", for readers who might join that program or already have. So it counts like a review. A brand feature profiles or interviews one company without judging its product, like "How Tolt grew to $1M". It shows as a guide and earns no review points, because a friendly profile isn't a verdict on the product. Fair enough.

You'll sometimes see a chip like "30% recurring" or "affiliate link". That's what the page itself says about what its author already promotes. The chip comes from the search result, so the scan never loads the page to get it, and it doesn't infer anything.

Already carries tracking links

Some rows say Already carries tracking links to Tolt, or just "already carries an affiliate tracking link". That line means RecruitAffiliates.ai saw a real tracking link in what the person published. It's the strongest thing a row can tell you, because it isn't a guess about whether they'd promote software. They already do, and they already get paid for it. You don't have to explain how any of this works to them.

A tracking link is a normal web link with an id on the end, so the software knows who to pay. https://tolt.io/?ref=jane is one. The ref=jane part is Jane's id. RecruitAffiliates.ai looks for three things: an id like ?ref=, ?via= or ?aff=; a redirect path like /go/ or /recommends/; and links through an affiliate network, which is a company that sits in the middle and handles the paying.

RecruitAffiliates.ai names a competitor only when it can prove which one. If the link goes to your competitor's own site, it says so. If it goes through a network, the network hides who's on the other end, so the row says a link exists and names nobody. A plain link to a competitor's homepage is not a tracking link, and RecruitAffiliates.ai doesn't count it.

Where this comes from:

The scan itself costs nothing extra and adds no waiting. It never visits anyone's page. A search result is a title and a couple of sentences, though, and it rarely has links in it. So when you save a website, RecruitAffiliates.ai reads up to four of their pages: the three that earned the score and their home page. It looks at every link on them. It uses the same rules as above. The row then says when it saw the link: "seen on their page 23 Sep 2026".

A save reads up to four pages, and the next section says exactly what. A scan also checks each website's own page, which The page check in a scan explains. Neither costs you a credit.

You'll see the link on the row, with the id taken off. RecruitAffiliates.ai never stores or shows somebody's affiliate id.

A row that carries a link to one of your competitors gets up to 10 extra relevance points. A link RecruitAffiliates.ai can't tie to a competitor gets 5. Nothing loses points for having no links, and plenty of good affiliates have none.

What a save reads

A scan only reads search results. Saving a website is what lets RecruitAffiliates.ai look closer, and only at that one site, never the rest of the list.

Their pages. Up to four: the three pages that earned the score, then their home page.

• RecruitAffiliates.ai introduces itself as RecruitAffiliatesBot/1.0 (+https://recruitaffiliates.ai/bot), so a site owner can see who called.
• It reads public pages only. It gives up on a slow page after 6 seconds and reads at most the first 512 KB.
• It never looks for or keeps an email address. Finding an address is what an email credit does.

What the pages say. From the same pages, with the page each fact came from:

• Their social profiles on YouTube, X, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. A profile counts only if their home page links to it, or two of their pages do. A review links to other people's channels all the time, so one mention isn't enough.
• Whether they run a newsletter on Substack, beehiiv, Kit or Mailchimp. A signup form counts on any page. A plain link counts only on their home page.
• Tracking links, as in Already carries tracking links.

Where their search traffic comes from. DataForSEO, the search data company behind the scan, estimates how many visits a site gets from Google in each country. The profile shows the top five as shares, labelled "Search traffic by country (DataForSEO estimate)". A country under 5% of the traffic or 200 visits is counted and left out. Nobody counted these visits. Read them as a rough split.

• Big sites can have more countries than DataForSEO returns in one answer. When the list comes back full, it may be missing the biggest markets, so RecruitAffiliates.ai shows no split rather than a wrong one.
• Most small sites are covered, and small sites are the ones worth emailing.

What they rank for. Up to five searches they show up for in your country, with where they rank and how many people search it a month. A search with under 100 searches a month is counted and left out.

How big they are, from real visits. Google's Chrome UX Report (CrUX) ranks sites by real visits from Chrome users: search, email, social, the lot. It puts each site in a bucket, like "top 50,000". The profile shows the bucket for your country if the site is in it, or worldwide if not. It's credited "Chrome UX Report (CrUX) by Google, CC BY 4.0". Most small sites aren't in any list. That's fine. RecruitAffiliates.ai never calls a site "unranked" or "small" because it's missing.

If a website has no traffic estimate, its CrUX bucket fills in for it in the score's audience fit: the top 10,000 counts as High, the top 100,000 as Medium and the top 1,000,000 as Low. A real traffic estimate always wins.

Who gets what, and when it runs. Every saved site gets its pages read and its CrUX bucket. A trial gets the traffic split and the keywords on its first 50 saved websites. A paid plan gets them on every saved site. RecruitAffiliates.ai asks DataForSEO again once a month for a saved site, so the numbers stay current.

The page check in a scan

Every scan now opens the page of each website it finds. We call this the page check. It asks one thing. Does this person already earn money by recommending products they like to their readers? It costs you nothing.

What it reads. Up to four pages a site: the page that matched your search, their home page, and up to two contact pages. The rules are the same as for a save: public pages only, one page a second per site.

What it looks for.

• Proof they earn from links: a tracking link, a redirect like /go/, an affiliate network, a promo code, or a line that says they earn commission.
• Who runs the site: a person, a company, or a publication.
• A public way to reach them: a shared address like partnerships@, a contact form, or a personal address on their own site. Only a shared address is kept. For a personal one, the row notes that it exists.

An AI model (Qwen 3.8 Flash) reads the page text to say who runs the site and what the page is for. It has to quote the page. A quote that isn't on the page word for word throws the whole answer away, so the model can't make up a reason.

What changes on your list.

• Proven affiliates move up. A site whose page shows it earns from links sorts to the top of your first 50. A site whose newest page is a year old doesn't.
• Its score says why. For example: "Their page earns commission: a tracked link and an affiliate disclosure, and has a personal email address on the site."
• Some rows move to Hidden. The page showed a vendor, your brand, a competitor, a big platform, a coupon site or an unrelated topic. Each keeps its reason. Bring any back.
• Review sites stay. A site that publishes reviews is a publisher, so it stays on your list.

A page that won't load, or blocks us, leaves the row as it was. YouTube channels and your uploaded customers are never page-checked.

Who runs the site

Some company blogs read just like a creator's. A search title can't tell them apart. So the scan also has an AI model read each site's home page and say what kind of site it is. We call this the home-page check. It's being switched on, so your scans may not run it yet.

What it decides. One of these, from the home page alone:

• A creator or publisher. It stays. This includes a person who also sells a course, templates or their own services, like a web designer who writes tutorials.
• A company selling its own product, like software or a shop. Hidden as "Sells its own product".
• Your brand or a competitor. Hidden the same way.
• A firm that sells services to clients and has nothing for readers. Hidden as an agency.
• A marketplace, booking site or directory. Hidden as a directory.
• A site where anyone can post, like a forum. Hidden as a big platform.

The model has to quote the home page to hide a site. If the quote isn't on the page word for word, the site stays. When it's unsure, the site stays.

Big publishers. A major magazine or news site, like Rolling Stone, stays on your list with its score. It sorts below independent creators who score about the same. A newsroom rarely answers an affiliate pitch.

Two labels on each row.

• Already promotes: their page shows they earn commission. These sort first.
• Good fit: their site writes for your kind of buyer, but we found no proof they earn commission. They still count, and you can pitch them.

Podcasts

The same check reads a podcast's own website, when the show's feed names one. Some shows are marketing for an agency or a software company, like a show an SEO agency runs to win clients. Those are hidden. A host who sells their own coaching or courses stays. A show whose only website is its hosting service's page, like Buzzsprout or Spotify, isn't checked: that page can't say who makes the show.

Sites that link to your competitors

Some rows say Links to your competitors where the others say "Weekly scan". These didn't come from Google. RecruitAffiliates.ai asked a backlink index: a list of which pages link to which sites, built by a company that reads the web all day. DataForSEO runs the one RecruitAffiliates.ai uses.

For each competitor, RecruitAffiliates.ai asks the index who links to them, and keeps a site only if you could check the link yourself:

• A tracking link to the competitor's own site, like ?via=, ?fpr= or ?ref=, or a redirect path like /go/.
• A link through the competitor's own page on a network. PartnerStack gives each brand an address like rewardful.partnerlinks.io, and Impact does the same on sjv.io and pxf.io. RecruitAffiliates.ai only asks about an address like that once the scan has already seen it.
• A plain link from a real piece of writing, like a review or a guide. A plain link from a footer, a tag page or a list of links doesn't count.

Two things never count. One is a link to another business's programme that happens to run on a competitor's platform, like a signup page on stasher.tapfiliate.com. That makes the site Stasher's partner, not a Tapfiliate affiliate. The other is a page on a customer's corner of a shared host, like acme.freshdesk.com. It belongs to Acme, not to Freshdesk.

A row found this way says why, in one line. Let's say a blog has a ?via= link to Rewardful on its roundup page. The row says "Links to Rewardful with a ?via= tracking link, from /best-affiliate-software". Open it. The link's there. It's the same check as Already carries tracking links, and the id is taken off the same way.

A site that already has a tracking link to a competitor is the strongest row RecruitAffiliates.ai can show you, because they've already signed up for a programme like yours and they're getting paid from it right now. Same checks, though. A vendor, a directory or a site on the wrong side of the deal is hidden the same way as any other row.

What it can't see:

• A site that hides the link behind its own redirect, like theirblog.com/go/tolt. The index sees a link to their own site, so it doesn't know where it goes.
• A link a page adds with code after it loads.
• A brand's own custom address, like try.brand.com.

When it runs. On your first scan, every weekly scan, and your own competitor searches. It doesn't run on topic or lookalike searches, which aren't about your competitors. It runs after the Google searches and shares their budget. If the scan runs out of money, this part stops first, and the Google results are kept.

How many competitors. On a trial scan the Google searches come first, so it can usually ask about four or five competitors. A paid plan asks about more.

Affiliate IDs on your competitors' links

Some affiliate links carry the affiliate's own site as a tag. For example, tolt.io/?ref=efficient.app says the visitor came from efficient.app. The Wayback Machine, a public archive of the web, keeps a list of addresses like that.

Once a month RecruitAffiliates.ai reads that list for each of your competitors and keeps the sites it names. It costs you nothing and uses no credits.

• A site found this way shows on its row as "Affiliate ID efficient.app seen on tolt.io".
• It goes through the same checks as every other website before you see it, so vendors and directories are hidden the same way.
• The first read happens the night after your first scan. The sites it finds show up at your next scan.
• It works when your competitors' affiliate links name a site. It finds little when they use numbers, which is common for consumer brands on the large affiliate networks.
• A tag that's only a name, like via=jane, isn't used. Guessing the site behind a name goes wrong too often.

Podcasts

Some rows are podcasts. They come from Podcast Index, a free public list of nearly every podcast in the world, and from each show's RSS feed: the public file a show publishes to list its episodes, which is what every podcast app reads to show you new ones. Everything on a podcast row comes from that feed.

How a show gets on the list.

• RecruitAffiliates.ai searches episode titles and descriptions for each competitor's name. A one-word name gets your category's word on the end, the same as on Google. So "Impact" becomes "Impact affiliate".
• It searches show titles for your keywords.
• It reads the feeds those searches point to, at most 40 of them.
• A show makes the list only if one of its own episodes names a competitor, or matches a keyword in its title. That episode is the row's evidence. Open it and check.

A search hit alone never counts. A show about "rewarding habits" isn't about Rewardful, and an episode on "the impact of AI" isn't about Impact. The name has to mean your competitor, in the episode itself.

What's left out. A competitor's own show, a platform's own show, a show with no new episode in a year, and a show in another language. These are counted on the scan and never written, so they can't take a place in your top 50.

Transcripts. Some shows publish a written transcript for each episode. When an episode's title and notes don't name a competitor, RecruitAffiliates.ai reads its transcript, if there is one, and looks for a name there. It reads the newest three a show has, at most 40 in a scan, and only the first part of each file. A transcript is only searched, never saved. The row's evidence stays the episode, with a note that the name came up in the transcript. Spoken text is loose, so a plain one-word name like "Tolt" doesn't count there. A longer name, or a coined one like "PartnerStack", does, with a word from your category nearby.

Links in the show notes. Many shows put links under each episode. A tracking link to a competitor there, like ?via= or ?fpr=, is the same proof as on a website: they already earn from a programme like yours. The row says Already carries tracking links, "in their show notes". A link to someone else's programme doesn't count as naming a competitor.

What a podcast row doesn't have: an audience number. Only the host sees a show's downloads. So there's nothing honest to show, and the row says How big their audience is: not measured. Its 30 points follow relevance and recent activity instead, which means a show earns them only by staying on topic and putting out episodes often. Recent activity counts episodes a month over the last ten. Weekly is High. Fortnightly is Medium.

How many. Up to 40. Podcasts never take a place from YouTube or websites, which keep their shares of the scan exactly as before; podcasts fill whatever room those two leave, best scores first.

The contact. Apple asks every show for an owner address, and the feed publishes it. When you reveal a podcast's email, RecruitAffiliates.ai reads it then, never before. The address comes from podcast_rss_owner. If it belongs to a hosting company rather than the show, RecruitAffiliates.ai reads the show's own website instead. It costs the same one credit as any reveal.

What it costs us. Nothing. Podcast Index is free, and so are the feeds and transcripts.

What the weekly scan re-does

The weekly scan runs your whole search again, so it can tell you three things a single scan can't.

• A traffic trend. Each weekly scan adds that month's estimate to the row instead of replacing it. It also asks for the last twelve months for the top 25 rows on your list, so the profile can draw a trend straight away. Your first scan doesn't make this lookup. A trend needs two months. Until then the profile says "No trend yet".
• Where they rank now. Each page keeps every search that found it and where it ranked, so the row's "Ranks 3rd for 'affiliate software'" is this week's place, not a guess.
• Who stopped showing up. A missed scan is a weekly scan that didn't find a row you can see. After two in a row, the row says Not seen in the last 2 scans and its recent activity drops to 3 of 20. Find them again and it resets. Only the weekly scan counts: a search you start is narrow on purpose, so not finding a row says nothing. A source that failed that week doesn't count either.

When the next scan runs

RecruitAffiliates.ai scans your brand again about a week after your last full scan, on a weekday that stays the same for your brand. The first weekly scan lands 7 to 13 days after your first one, at 04:30 UTC; every one after that is 7 days on. Brands are spread across the week so one morning never runs more scans than YouTube allows in a day. The header on Discover counts down to the real date. Rows found by the latest scan carry a New tag.

If your trial has ended, the weekly scan doesn't run. Everything you've found stays where it is.

Want a break? Pause the weekly scan for one brand: open Settings, then Account, and turn off Weekly scan. Nothing else changes. When you turn it back on, an overdue scan runs at 04:30 UTC the next morning, so you don't wait a full week. Owners and admins can change it.

Where a YouTube channel ranks

RecruitAffiliates.ai remembers where YouTube placed each video for each search, from 1st to 50th. A channel scores on the same steps as a website: 1st to 3rd, 4th to 10th, 11th to 20th. The row says "3rd in YouTube for 'Impact review affiliate'". Below 20th it says "Found in YouTube for" and no number, because a 34th place isn't worth quoting. In the profile, each video shows its place beside its views.

The score on a channel is RecruitAffiliates.ai's own, worked out from YouTube's numbers. It isn't a YouTube rating. So the profile shows YouTube's own counts beside it: subscribers, total views and videos.

When YouTube's daily searches run out

YouTube channels aren't part of results yet, so none of this happens today. It's here for when they are.

YouTube caps how many searches an app can make in a day, and every RecruitAffiliates.ai account shares that cap. On a busy day your scan can find it used up. When that happens:

• The website half of your scan runs as normal.
• The YouTube half waits. The banner says Your first YouTube creators arrive tomorrow morning, and more follow over the next few days.
• At 08:30 UTC the next day, a morning run searches YouTube for every brand that waited, before any weekly scan gets a turn. You get the same number of searches your first scan was owed.
• While YouTube's allowance is small, a new trial's first YouTube search runs its five best searches first. Those are reviews of your competitors. The rest follow on the next mornings, so every new trial sees some YouTube creators quickly.

If only a few searches are left, RecruitAffiliates.ai runs the most useful ones that fit, and waits only when fewer than 10 are left.

When a scan can't run

A scan that can't start, or fails part-way, tells you why in one sentence:

• Nothing to search for. Add at least one competitor or keyword.
• Plan can't scan. Your trial ended, or your plan lapsed. Pick a plan to scan again.
• Research budget used. RecruitAffiliates.ai caps what it spends on outside data for each trial. If a scan reaches the cap it stops cleanly, keeps what it found, and says so.
• Provider calls are off. We switched them off on our side. Nothing was charged. Try again later.

A search that cost you a search credit and then failed gives the credit back on its own, and the message says so. So does a search that finishes and finds nothing new: no affiliates at all, or only ones you already had.

A scan that gets stuck, say because one of our servers restarted, is stopped within about an hour. Nothing more is charged, and a search credit comes back.

When a source didn't answer

A scan searches websites, YouTube and podcasts. Sometimes one of them doesn't answer. Let's say YouTube has a problem on its side or ours. The scan still finishes with the other sources. It tells you which one is missing, in one line: We couldn't get results from YouTube this time.

You see that line in three places:

• The banner on Discover. It doesn't say "Your results are ready" for a scan like this.
• The bell notice for a first, weekly or search scan.
• The scan email, under the examples.

A source that ran out of time before it found anything is a different case. It keeps its own warning and a button to search those again. To try a source that didn't answer, run another search, or wait for the next weekly scan. It searches every source again.

When a source stops early

A source that stops early to beat the five-minute limit keeps everything it had found by then. The banner says so: We stopped searching websites early so your results are ready now. Everything we found is saved. Nothing is lost. Want more? Run another search, or wait for the next weekly scan. It searches every source again.

What we keep

Website rows, their scores and their evidence stay for as long as your account does. Normalized traffic facts and the site's about text stay with the row too. The raw data a provider sent us is deleted after 90 days, but removing that raw payload does not change a later score.

Podcast rows work the same way. The feed's raw data goes after 90 days. From Podcast Index, RecruitAffiliates.ai keeps two things, the feed's address and the show's id in the index, and never a copy of its listing.

YouTube channels

YouTube rows follow YouTube's data rules. A successful scan refreshes the channel data it fetches. Scans run weekly. An hourly cleanup removes YouTube API data from discovery rows after 29 days without a successful refresh. This includes the channel ID and link, name, country, language, description, statistics and video details. The row becomes an anonymous placeholder; your saved status, notes and tags stay. A later scan can create a new row with fresh details. Scores stay off. YouTube must accept the Analytics & Reporting amendment for this feature before scoring can return.

Coming soon

These changes are built and will switch on soon:

• Creators who haven't posted in six months will rank lower.
• A Pro affiliate chip will mark creators who are already in 3 or more affiliate programs.
• Newsletter writers on Substack, beehiiv and Ghost will become a new source. Google searches find them by topic and by the competitors they write about. If a writer publishes an address on their own sponsor or about page, the row keeps it with the page it came from.
• Podcasts will also come from Apple Podcasts' search, which matches what a show is about and not only its name. Shows with no new episode in a year, or in another language, are skipped before RecruitAffiliates.ai reads them. A scan will keep room for up to 40 podcasts even when websites fill the list. It still costs nothing.
• If a first or weekly scan finds fewer than 25 affiliates scoring 60 or more, RecruitAffiliates.ai will search a bit further. It tries a nearby country, nearby topics or similar brands, on websites and podcasts only. New finds join the bottom of your list, so nothing you're reading moves. Discover says what it's searching, like Searching further: Ireland and 2 similar brands (Tolt).