Read Time: Approx. 4 Minutes 53 Seconds
Author: Ben Thompson
The growth of the affiliate marketing industry shows no signs of slowing down. According to the report published by The Affiliate & Partner Marketing Association (APMA) earlier this year, UK brands invested £1.7bn in affiliate marketing in 2024, generating over £19bn in revenue and accounting for 10% of UK ecommerce, and 15% of online travel, which represents a 9% year-on-year increase.
CSS
I’ve only been in the world of affiliate marketing for around five and a half years at the time of writing this, and I’ve ran out of fingers to count the number of times I’ve seen or heard resistance to the idea of CSS publishers being part of an affiliate program. In my opinion, negative connotations around CSS publishers cannibalising your paid search traffic are coming from a place of poor strategy and poor advertiser (or agency) to publisher relationships.
The truth is that a seasoned CSS publisher coupled with the right strategy can help take your affiliate performance to the next level. Struggling to shift low margin items due to your own paid search budget constraints? Want additional support in key sale periods? How about testing a new market, category, or price point? Or maybe product feed intelligence and price competitiveness insights to inform your wider price and marketing decisions? You see where I’m going with this…
When media efficiency and accountability is such a key discussion point within paid teams, they can take comfort knowing that CSS publishers take on all that risk alone (and upfront) so it’s no surprise that we’ve already seen teams shifting a portion of paid search budget across to affiliate. This is partly why the last APMA report (see introduction) also found that CSS were one of the top growing publisher types last year.
The team at Customer First Digital enjoys solid working relationships with key publishers like adstrong, Genie Shopping, and Redbrain but equally important is our wide range of experience across all other paid marketing channels. Our knowledge in paid search ensures we’re best placed to advise, guide, and test and measure the value that adding CSS publishers to your program can bring.
Integration of Influencer, PR, and Affiliate:
As referenced in our Affiliate Marketing Trends For 2025 article, TikTok had begun to emerge as a key platform for brands due to its enormous growth. With reports in 2025 suggesting that TikTok drove more than $500m GMV over Black Friday and Cyber Monday alone (compared to $100m in 2024), this growth shows no sign of slowing down. Additionally, we saw integrations between affiliate networks and TikTok become a reality this year, which only fuels TikTok’s expansion as well as increasing the earning potential for creators using these platforms.
It’s worth noting that TikTok merely accelerated the shift, but the underlying trend here is creator-led distribution, and affiliate networks have adapted to support this with features like video attribution and assisted conversion models. We’re starting to see that affiliate tracking (network or otherwise) is increasingly becoming the connective tissue between influencers and PR teams, helping to determine attribution, performance, and validation. In this way, affiliate tracking is becoming the solution to bridging the two together.
But why is this important for 2026? We believe that PR teams will increasingly be measured on tracked revenue influence and influencers that don’t have performance alignment will struggle to justify fees (beyond pre-sale awareness activities), whether this is right or not is a conversation for another day. From a network perspective, it’s likely they’ll continue to build native creator tools in a bid to keep data within their platforms.
At Customer First Digital, we specialise in helping brands integrate these elements, ensuring a unified approach built to deliver long-term success in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
Broadening your program beyond the UK:
Although expanding your reach beyond the UK is not without its challenges (tariffs, shipping costs, stock forecasting, etc.) the uncertainty and slower growth the UK has seen over the last few years, coupled with things like seasonal and discretionary spend impact and rising advertising costs, it’s no surprise to see international growth on our list of trends to look out for in 2026.
Expanding your programme beyond the UK offers multiple strategic benefits, for instance, it opens access to larger and faster-growing markets, diversifying revenue streams and reducing reliance on the mixed UK consumer spending. There is also the potential that international expansion can improve your media efficiency by targeting less competitive markets, leading to incremental revenue.
Although the potential benefits to broadening your program don’t end here, we’ll finish on the fact that it can help strengthen long-term brand presence, as well as to help smooth those seasonal revenue fluctuations we see in the UK by leveraging markets with different peak periods.
As well as the UK, Customer First Digital hold strong relationships with publishers in the US and EU so we are well placed to support you in your growth outside of the UK.
LLM Citations:
It’s no question that AI’s importance continues to grow in all aspects of marketing and the world of affiliate is no different. However, my belief heading into 2026 is that advertisers will be looking to the affiliate channel to help gain traction in the new LLM-driven world.
From research here at Customer First Digital, we’ve seen that a high number of evergreen articles older than 6+ months is often referenced in AI overviews, but newer content is surfacing quickly which suggests that now more than ever, authenticity and genuinely useful content matters more than ever but for those long-term citations, your content should have depth and longevity.
What does this mean for affiliates, or more crucially, how can you as an advertiser gain traction in the new LLM-driven world? It shows that you shouldn’t rely solely on your own content or website to secure your spot – finding those publishers that can support on this endeavour should be a key addition to your affiliate strategy in 2026.
The team at Customer First Digital can support advertisers in partnering with publishers who can create independent third-party content which covers brands contextually, which can help LLMs to recognise (and importantly) recommend your brand.
Conclusion:
At Customer First Digital, we know that staying ahead in affiliate marketing means anticipating change, not reacting to it. In 2026, the landscape continues to evolve rapidly - from the rise of creator-led commerce and cross-channel integrations to shifting consumer behaviours and complex compliance requirements. Our expertise enables brands to build affiliate programmes that are not only resilient to these changes but also designed to capture new opportunities as they arise.
Beyond driving sales, affiliate marketing today is about building trust, maintaining credibility, and delivering value for all stakeholders. With Customer First Digital as your partner, we can help you turn challenges into growth and establish a foundation for sustainable, long-term success in affiliate marketing. Get in touch today and we can discuss how to transform your affiliate programme in 2026.
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