Written by Brook Schaaf

The best affiliate marketing podcast episode this year was Awin’s 2026 Affiliate Industry Predictions, Part 1 (also their first episode since last August). It featured Max Willens of eMarketer, a characteristically measured analyst and one of the industry’s quieter observers, alongside Kevin Edwards of the APMA, a more outspoken industry advocate.

Reflecting on 2025 as context for 2026, Edwards referred to a “reset,” while Willens used the term “bracing,” elaborating that it “felt like an unusually whiplash-inducing year” because of economic, AI, and traffic trends, among other challenges. For his part, co-host Rob Davinson summed it up with “liminal.” Indeed, it does feel like we’re crossing a threshold into something new and perhaps unknown.

After diagnosing the disruption, the emotional timbre of the podcast unexpectedly shifted toward optimism, despite the headwinds of zero-click uncertainty and MMM (Marketing or Media Mix Modeling) non-compatibility. The basis for this optimism is the vast creator economy, which is deeply intertwined with affiliate marketing. Implicit in the discussion was the assumption that most other affiliate categories would continue to prosper as well.

Edwards later raised the provocative possibility that affiliate marketing might become probabilistic in its tracking. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Partnerize CEO Matt Gilbert has recently been making this exact point. As Gilbert told Hello Partner last week about their new tracking solution, “With VantagePoint for Publishers, we are making influence visible as attribution shifts from deterministic clicks to probabilistic, journey-driven signals.”

By “provocative,” I mean that for longtime practitioners like me, it is still strange to imagine affiliate marketing moving from its historical strength of “this user converted” to “here’s the estimated contribution.” That strength has always doubled as a weakness, however, because it invites granular and often emotional hyperscrutiny, especially when tracking is disrupted by device switching, cookie clearing or blocking, merchant malfeasance, or other failures.

As a comparison, I asked ChatGPT for examples of similar measurement shifts in other domains: inventory counts to inventory turns; on-time delivery to OTIF (on-time-in-full) in shipping; time-on-task to output-based KPIs; rule compliance to risk scores; and, using strikingly similar language, deterministic diagnosis to probabilistic risk stratification in medicine.

The channel is not realistically going to abandon deterministic tracking mechanisms anytime soon, if ever. Affiliate marketing will also retain its one-to-one relationships and performance-based compensation, because these models remain compatible with its infrastructure and operating norms.

Math-based probabilistic determinations may also align more naturally with MMM modeling, providing fairer attribution to affiliate content creators and shopping portals.

Deterministic tracking built affiliate marketing, but it may not be sufficient to carry it forward. A probabilistic layer does not represent retreat; it represents adaptation. In a world increasingly governed by modeled truth, affiliate marketing may find that embracing uncertainty is the most realistic way to remain credible.

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