Write the rulebook before the first page
Before building a new affiliate site, we audited 26 sites in its market against 13 rules. None of the affiliates met all of them. Why the rules came first, and how they became part of the build.
Affiliate sites live in markets with rules: what you must disclose, what you must never claim, what every page has to carry. Most sites treat those rules as a clean-up job after launch. On a new US content and affiliate site, we wrote them down before the first page existed.
Audited
26
Sites in the market: leading affiliates and official sources
Rules
13
In the rulebook, written from the research
Average
6.2
Possible rule issues per affiliate site
What the audit showed
We measured every competitor against the same 13 rules. Of 19 affiliates, none met all 13. They averaged 6.2 possible issues each, and the worst had 11. We also checked the market’s best-known guide against our own research: 8 of 50 states were out of date.
That is not a reason to feel superior. It is a map of where a new site can be more trustworthy than the incumbents from day one.
Rules as code, not as a checklist
A rulebook in a document gets forgotten by the third week. So the rules went into the build itself:
- A page that lacks its required notices does not publish.
- A page that uses a banned claim does not publish.
- Partner offers carry a disclosure, and AI-written content is labelled.
The check runs on every build, so a new page, a template change or an automatic content run all face the same gate.
Friendly, not fearful
Compliance done badly turns a page into a wall of warnings. The rulebook asks for one short line of notices per page, so the rules protect readers without driving them away.
Three days in
Research, rulebook and a first version of the site, hidden from search engines while the client reviews it, all landed in the first three days.
The examples in this article come from real engagements. Client details withheld; every figure comes from the client’s own data.
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