How the scores work

Everything on this site comes from measured data collected on 23 September 2026, for Google US in English. Here's what we measured, how it turns into a score and where the limits are.

What we measured

  • Keywords. Search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, intent, AI search volume and the year-on-year trend for 2,969 keywords: each brand, "[brand] review", "alternatives", "pricing" and "affiliate program", plus a head term per category (DataForSEO Labs and AI Keyword Data).
  • Live results pages. The Google top 10 for 1,767 searches, with AI Overview text and its cited sources, People also ask and related searches. Every result is classed as vendor, rival vendor, review platform (G2, Capterra, Trustpilot and the like), forum or video, directory or independent.
  • AI mentions. How often each brand appears in Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT answers, and which sources those answers cite (DataForSEO LLM Mentions).
  • AI answers. 479 full answers from ChatGPT and Gemini with web search on: "best X" and "best X affiliate programs" for every category, five general affiliate questions and "Is X worth it?" for 153 programs.
  • Commission terms. The 117 board programs have hand-checked terms. Every off-board program that claimed 30% or more recurring was verified against its own affiliate page or portal on 23 September, and on 26 September we re-read the vendor pages of 49 more high-traffic programs whose terms had been collected automatically. Everything else is marked "unverified", and we don't repeat those figures in titles, answers or summaries.
  • AI demand estimates. The "Est. AI demand" figures come from DataForSEO's AI Keyword Data. It is a modeled estimate based partly on Google's People also ask data, not a count of prompts anyone observed.

Winnability (0 to 100)

  • Demand, up to 30 points: log of review searches + 0.6 x alternatives + 0.4 x pricing.
  • Difficulty, up to 20: the inverse of volume-weighted keyword difficulty.
  • Openness, up to 25: independent sites in those top 10s. Five or more gets full marks.
  • AI opportunity, up to 15: half AI mention volume, half the share of AI citations that go to independent sites.
  • AI Overview penalty, down to -10: the share of those searches that show an AI Overview.
  • Demand gate: the whole score is halved under 50 weighted searches and multiplied by 0.8 under 150, so an empty niche can't score well just because it's uncontested.

Content opportunity bands: A, strong content bet at 60+, B, worth a post at 45 to 60, C, roundup only at 30 to 45, D, skip as a page under 30 and no search demand under 10 weighted searches. These rate the chance to win search traffic. They are not a recommendation to join the affiliate program: check the separate terms status for that.

Index vs GoHighLevel (board only)

35% economics (the log of the 24-month referral value, discounted 25% when terms or price aren't fully confirmed), 50% winnability and 15% program friction, all multiplied by the same demand gate. It's scaled so GoHighLevel, the benchmark, is 100.

24-month referral value

Monthly commission x the sum of (1 - churn) to the power t over 24 months, or fewer if the program caps payouts. Churn is 3% a month for sticky tools, 5.5% for average ones and 8.5% for tools people drop quickly. These rates are our modeling assumptions based on the type of tool, not retention measured for each program, so every 24-month value on this site is an estimate.

Known limits

  • US English only, so programs with mostly international demand look weaker than they are.
  • "Independent" means not the vendor, a platform or another program in this atlas. That definition is too generous: on 26 September we classified all 3,060 domains counted as independent and about 1,800 of them are other software companies' blogs (for example, rival hosts ranking for "Kinsta alternatives"). Counting those as vendors would lower most winnability scores, cut the number of A-rated programs sharply and drop independent sites' share of AI Overview citations from about 36% to about 15%. The board's top programs barely move. We will apply the stricter classification in the next data update. Until then, treat openness and winnability as upper bounds, not precise rankings.
  • AI answers vary from run to run. Treat a single mention as a signal, not a fact.
  • Ambiguous brand names were searched with a qualifier (Kit as "convertkit", Close as "close crm" and so on).
  • Terms change. Every program page shows the date we checked and links to the source.

Total data cost for this edition: $13.85 in DataForSEO API calls. The full dataset is on the data page.