Partnerize Partnerships Day 2026: Why affiliate measurement must evolve beyond last-click

On 1 July, the intent.ly team attended Partnerize Partnerships Day in London, where the conversations were varied and insightful but with one topic standing out: how AI is changing customer journeys and what that means for affiliate measurement.

Two expert panel sessions tackled perhaps the biggest challenge facing the industry right now: how do we continue to measure and reward partner influence when fewer customer journeys include a measurable click?

The architecture of the machine-mediated market: measuring, verifying, and rewarding zero-click influence

The first session was chaired by Maura Smith, CMO at Partnerize and explored how AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews are fundamentally changing the way consumers discover brands.

Maura was joined by Jeff Thompson, SVP Strategic Alliances at Partnerize and Eliott Lee from Profound to discuss how consumers are no longer simply searching the web – they’re “having a conversation with the internet.” Increasingly, AI engines are completing much of the research on behalf of the customer before they ever visit a brand’s website.

For affiliate marketers, this presents a significant measurement challenge.

“The last-click model is slowly disappearing… you can’t optimise or fund what you can’t see.”

When AI has already influenced a purchasing decision before a consumer reaches a retailer’s website, the journey often appears as direct or organic traffic, leaving publishers and partners who influenced the sale invisible within traditional attribution models.

The panel also highlighted the growing importance of rewarding publishers whose trusted content is increasingly being cited by AI models. Without new measurement and compensation frameworks, there is a real risk that the high-quality content feeding these AI experiences becomes unsustainable.

One of the strongest messages from the session was that affiliate marketing already has many of the relationships, infrastructure and commercial models needed to solve this problem – but measurement must evolve beyond clicks alone.

When influence becomes invisible, measurement and compensation must become infrastructure

The second panel was chaired by Aftab Aslam, Global VP Customer Solutions at Partnerize and brought together perspectives from an agency (Acquire), advertiser (Loveholidays) and publisher (The Independent) to discuss what this shift means in practice. 

They all agreed that “Trust drives decision-making, not clicks. We’re measuring the wrong thing if we’re measuring clicks in isolation.”

That sentiment was echoed throughout the discussion, as the panel explained that AI hasn’t created a new measurement problem – it has simply exposed one that has existed for years.

Publishers like The Independent have always influenced customers well before the final click, but traditional attribution models have struggled to recognise that value. As Ed Hutchinson explained, trusted editorial content creates inspiration, consideration and confidence long before a conversion occurs.

The panel also highlighted that brands need to move towards more balanced compensation models, rewarding upper-funnel content and influence alongside traditional CPA activity, rather than relying solely on last-click attribution.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway was that measurement needs to become multi-dimensional, combining attribution with incrementality testing, Media Mix Modelling (MMM), impression data and emerging AI measurement frameworks.

As one speaker put it: “Budgets shouldn’t follow channels. They should follow outcomes.”

Ending the day on a high

After a day full of thought-provoking conversations about the future of partnerships and affiliate measurement, we were delighted to win Partnership of the Year alongside Dr. Barbara Sturm at the Partnerize Performance Awards! 

A fantastic end to a day that reinforced one thing above all else: the future of affiliate marketing is about measuring performance more intelligently – and all this on the same day England won the football too!