You can find affiliate websites with Ahrefs. It works, thousands of people do it, and if you have an Ahrefs subscription already it costs you nothing extra. It is also slow, noisy, and it stops scaling at about the point your programme starts mattering.
This is the actual workflow, not a pitch. Follow it and you will get a usable list. The last two sections are honest about where it falls apart, because that is the part most articles on this query skip.
Key Takeaways
Ahrefs has no affiliate filter. You are inferring affiliate relationships from backlink patterns, and the inference is imperfect.
The core move is Site Explorer → Backlinks on a competitor, then filtering for tracking parameters in the target URL.
Four filters do most of the work: link type, anchor text, target URL parameters, and referring page type.
Expect roughly 10-20% of what you pull to be genuine, active affiliates. The rest is noise you filter by hand.
The method breaks on scale and on staleness: it is a snapshot, and it says nothing about whether a link still earns.
Step 1: Pick the right competitor, not the biggest one
Put a competitor into Site Explorer. Resist starting with the market leader — a site with 400,000 referring domains will bury you in noise, and its affiliates are usually locked into exclusive terms you cannot beat.
The better target is a competitor one tier above you that visibly runs an affiliate programme. Check for /affiliates, /partners or a footer link before you spend time on them. If they have no programme, their backlinks are just backlinks.
Step 2: Backlinks report, then filter for tracking parameters
Open Site Explorer → Backlinks. This is the raw list. Now cut it down:
Filter on the target URL. Affiliate links almost always carry a tracking parameter. Filter the target URL to contain any of:
ref=?via=aff=/affiliate=utm_source=combined with a partner-looking value/r/or/go/path segments
Filter link type to dofollow and nofollow separately. Most affiliate links are nofollow or sponsored — that is the disclosure working as intended. If you only look at dofollow you will miss the majority of a well-run programme.
Filter anchor text for review-shaped language: "review", "vs", "alternative", "discount", "coupon", "best".
Sort referring pages by traffic, not by domain rating. A DR 40 page pulling 8,000 monthly visits is worth more to you than a DR 70 page pulling nine.
Step 3: Read the referring page before you believe it
This is the step people skip and it is the one that decides whether your list is real. Open the page. You are checking three things:
- Is the link in editorial content or in a footer/sidebar? Sitewide footer links are rarely affiliate placements.
- Is there a disclosure? "We may earn a commission" is the strongest single signal you will get.
- Does the page rank for anything? A review nobody reads sends nobody.
Step 4: Find the contact, which is its own project
Ahrefs gives you a domain. It does not give you a person. From here it is the usual grind — the site's contact page, an author byline, a LinkedIn search, a guess at first@domain, and a verification tool so you are not burning your sending domain on bounces.
Budget roughly five minutes per prospect. On a list of 200 that is a working week.
Where this method stops working
Four limits, in the order you will hit them:
It is a snapshot, not a feed. The report tells you who linked at some point. It does not tell you who linked last week, which is exactly when a new affiliate is most worth approaching — they are actively publishing and have not yet settled on a favourite in your category.
It cannot tell earning links from dead ones. A 2023 roundup still carries the link. The affiliate stopped updating it in 2024. Ahrefs shows you both identically.
The parameter filter has both error types. Programmes using clean subdomains or server-side redirects leave no ref= to find, so you miss them. Meanwhile plenty of ?ref= links are analytics, not affiliate. You lose real partners and you chase fake ones.
It does not cover creators at all. A TikTok or YouTube affiliate driving real revenue puts the link in a bio or a description. There is no backlink. For a lot of categories that is now most of the programme, and a backlink tool is structurally blind to it.
When Ahrefs is the right answer anyway
Genuinely: if you need fewer than about twenty affiliates, do it manually. The workflow above will get you there in a couple of afternoons, you already pay for the tool, and doing it by hand teaches you what a good partner looks like in your category — which is knowledge worth having before you automate anything.
The method fails on repetition. Once a week, forever, across several competitors, including creators, filtering the same noise each time — that is when the hours stop being worth it.
What we built instead
AffiliateSpy does the same job from the other direction: it starts from a competitor, finds who is actually promoting them across websites and creator platforms, verifies the relationship is live rather than historical, scores fit, and returns contact details. It re-scans so new affiliates surface while they are still new.
Being straight about the trade: Ahrefs is a far better SEO tool than we will ever be, and if you already pay for it, the workflow above costs you nothing. We are worth it when the manual version becomes a weekly chore instead of a one-off project.
You can test the idea without signing up — the Affiliate Program Detector checks whether a competitor runs a programme at all, the Affiliate Checker tells you whether a specific page carries affiliate links, and the Competitor Finder gives you the list of competitors to start from. Broader context on the category is in our guide to affiliate marketing tools.