Where Affiliate Links Actually Work on Each Platform

Two different rulebooks apply to every link you post, and creators usually only read one.

The platform decides where a link can be clicked. The program decides where its links may be used at all. You can follow Instagram's rules perfectly and still be violating Amazon's.

#What's clickable, by surface

The short version, and it has changed enough that half the advice online is describing rules that no longer exist.

#The rules your program adds on top

This is the half people skip, and it is the half that closes accounts.

Amazon's Associates operating agreement is the strictest of the big programs, and its restrictions are absolute rather than discouraged. Its own wording:

You will not engage in any Promotional Activities in any offline manner, including by using any of our or our affiliates' trademarks or logos […] or any Special Link in connection with any printed material, ebook, mailing, or any oral solicitation.

Read that carefully, because it rules out places creators use constantly:

• Email and newsletters. An Amazon link in your newsletter is a violation, not a grey area.
• Ebooks and PDFs - including a free lead-magnet guide.
• Anything printed, and any spoken solicitation.
• Pop-ups, and links placed on Amazon itself - reviews, forums, wish lists.

Amazon also restricts framing its pages inside a WebView, and bids on its own trademarks are out.

#The leak nobody mentions

Here is the mechanic that costs more commission than any placement rule, and almost nothing written about affiliate links explains it.

A link tapped inside Instagram, TikTok or Facebook does not open in Safari or Chrome. It opens in a browser built into that app, and that browser keeps its own cookie storage - separate from the phone's real browser, and separate again from the retailer's app.

Swipe

So the question that decides whether you get paid is not "did they tap" but "did they buy in the same session".

They didn't, if they:

• tapped, looked, closed the app, and came back to it later in Safari;
• tapped, then opened the retailer's own app to check the price;
• were signed in on the app but not in the in-app browser, and gave up at the login screen.

Short attribution windows make this worse. A 24-hour window, plus a reader who browses now and buys tonight in a different app, loses you the sale twice over.

You cannot fix this from your side. What you can do is stop fighting it:

1. Link to the exact product, not a homepage or a category. Every extra tap is another chance to bail out and restart somewhere else.
2. Post when people can act, not when engagement is highest. Those are often different times.
3. Send them to one page that holds everything, so the journey is a tap and a buy rather than a search, a scroll and a change of app.

#Practical placement, per platform

Instagram. Use the bio links for the things that stay true for months - your storefront, not this week's post. Use the Story sticker for what's current. Because captions aren't clickable, the caption's job is to name the page, not to hold a URL.

TikTok. Your bio link is the only clickable surface, so it has to be a destination that stays relevant rather than one you swap daily.

YouTube. Descriptions are the strongest surface on any platform - clickable, permanent, and readable by search. Put the disclosure above the links, not below them. On Shorts, pin a comment as well; very few people expand a Short's description.

Pinterest. Affiliate links are allowed, and Pinterest's commercial content guidelines specifically warn against creating affiliate pins "repetitively or in large volumes", and against schemes where users save each other's affiliate pins. Volume is what gets flagged here, not the links themselves.

Newsletters. The best-converting surface for most creators - no algorithm between you and the reader - and simultaneously the one where you most need to check the program's terms. Amazon says no. Many networks say yes.

#A note on how fast this ages

Every rule above was checked on the date at the top of this page. Platform rules change more often than anything else here: follower gates appear and disappear, surfaces become clickable, programs rewrite their agreements without announcing it.

Two habits are worth more than any list:

• Re-read your main program's operating agreement once a year. It is dull and it is where the account-closing rules live.
• When you read a guide to this topic, look for the swipe-up rule. If it's still there, the page hasn't been touched since 2021.

---

Nothing here beats reading your own program's terms, which is the only document that can actually cost you an account. This page is a map of where to look.

---