Affilifest 2026: What the Industry Is Actually Talking About

Two days in Margate. One main-stage panel. Plenty of waltzer-based networking, and a lot of very honest conversations about where affiliate and partner marketing is headed.

Affilifest is only in its second year, but it's already carving out its own identity in the events calendar. Smaller, sharper, and refreshingly brand-centric, it's the kind of format where you actually learn something rather than collect lanyards.

At the most recent event, I hosted a panel on day one, looking at the parts of the affiliate channel that still need fixing: compliance, attribution, and the shifting role of content in an AI-driven world. I was joined by some powerhouse brands including Boots, Hughes Electricals, and LoveHolidays, plus compliance tech platform Marcode.

Here's what stood out.

AI search is making affiliate content more valuable, not less

There's a narrative doing the rounds that AI is going to hollow out publisher traffic. What the panel at Affilifest suggested is more nuanced than that.

Affiliate content is actively powering AI recommendations right now. That's a significant upper-funnel opportunity that the channel has been slow to articulate, and it deserves more attention.

What's becoming clearer is that the old separation between affiliates and digital PR doesn't hold up anymore. Publishers need the commercial flexibility that affiliate models provide. PR teams need the distribution and editorial relationships that publishers bring. Syncing those two functions isn't a nice-to-have. It's increasingly a strategic necessity.

The harder truth is that editorial sites are losing traffic to "clickless" LLM results. If publishers can't earn from the content they're producing, they'll produce less of it. That's bad for everyone in the ecosystem. The consensus at Affilifest was that fixed payments are going to become part of the landscape, not as a workaround, but as fair compensation for a role that's harder to track but genuinely valuable.

It's worth watching what Partnerize is doing here with Vantagepoint, and the broader work from partners like Open Attribution on industry-wide standards. Attribution that can fairly reward content partners while giving brands the visibility they need is the missing piece, and there's real momentum building around solving it.

Compliance still needs someone to own it

This one's been a talking point for as long as affiliate marketing has existed, which tells you something about how hard it is to fix.

The reason compliance is so persistent is structural: responsibility is fragmented, and there's rarely a clear commercial incentive to root out non-compliant behaviour before it's causing obvious damage.

At Genie Goals, our position is pretty straightforward. Knowing exactly where your traffic is coming from is the foundation of everything. You can't grow what you can't trust.

The brands on the panel were unusually candid about their own journeys here. Tools like Marcode gave them the evidence they needed to act, but they also had to accept a short-term performance dip when removing non-compliant volume. Every brand on the panel said performance recovered. And keeping inflated numbers to avoid that dip is, as one panellist put it, a race to the bottom.

The bottom line: whoever manages your programme needs to be laser-focused on this. It's your data and your money.

New partners worth knowing about

One of the more energising parts of Affilifest was just how much innovation is coming through at the partner level.

Hey Savi launched as a purely AI-agent-based fashion finder for women, which is a super interesting model to watch. And established names like Bupa and Days Out With The Kids were showcasing closed-user-group and loyalty opportunities with real reach.

If your mental model of affiliates is still "mostly voucher sites," you're missing a channel that has quietly become one of the most diverse and technically sophisticated in performance marketing. There's tech, deep consumer engagement, and meaningful scale at every stage of the funnel. The variety on show at Affilifest made that very clear.

Our verdict

A must-attend for anyone working in partnerships. It's one of the few events where brand-to-brand conversations actually happen, and where the topics on stage reflect what the industry is wrestling with rather than what makes for a safe panel. Oh, and a healthy dose of British seaside fun doesn’t go amiss, right?!

We'll be back next year. And if you want to talk through any of this for your own affiliate programme, get in touch with the team.

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