The TopRanked.io Weekly Digest: What’s Hot in Affiliate Marketing [Seeking Alpha Affiliates Review 2025 Update]

Quick Disclosure: We’re about to tell you how Seeking Alpha Affiliates is pretty great. And we really mean it. Just know that if you click on a Seeking Alpha Affiliates link, we may earn a small commission. Your choice.

This week, Trump did two notable things.

First, he went after the law firm behind the “Steele Dossier”, thus doing a classic Barbra Streisand move and reminding the world about this.

And then, he started a trade war.

Now, obviously it’s hard for us to make money on that first thing.

But as for the trade war thing… well, is there a better time to sell something “stocks” related?

TopRanked.io Affiliate Program of the Week — Seeking Alpha Affiliate Program Review [2025]

When the market’s volatile, most people just wanna make sense of it all. And the single best way to help them do that is to point them towards Seeking Alpha.

Especially since Seeking Alpha also has a pretty sweet affiliate program. Let me tell you a little but more about the Seeking Alpha affiliate program.

Seeking Alpha Affiliate Program — The Product

The Seeking Alpha product is pretty simple in principle — it’s basically a “portal” into anything and everything you need to get your head around the stock market (and beat it).

Now, I’m not going to waste too many words here telling you everything there is to know about the Seeking Alpha product. We’ve already written about Seeking Alpha here before. So, instead, I’m going to point you to a couple of relevant Seeking Alpha reviews if you want more details:

• Seeking Alpha “Quant” review (this is how you beat the market!)
• Seeking Alpha Affiliates Review (2024)
• Seeking Alpha Affiliate Program Review (2023)

Now, I know those Seeking Alpha reviews are all a little out of date. But, honestly, not much has changed since — Seeking Alpha is, more or less, still the exact same great product. So hopefully that should cover everything you need to know about the Seeking Alpha product.

Seeking Alpha Affiliate Program — The Commissions

Just like the product, not much has changed with the Seeking Alpha affiliate program. In 2025, it’s still the same old top-performing affiliate program it’s always been.

Here’s a quick recap of what you should expect as a Seeking Alpha affiliate:

• Seeking Alpha pays about $90 a sale on a CPA plan
• Seeking Alpha is also open to discussing custom commission plans with you.
• Seeking Alpha uses a 30-day tracking cookie
• Plus a constant rotation of fresh deals to help convert people
• Fast ACH or wire transfer payments.

And that’s pretty much everything you need to know.

Seeking Alpha Affiliates — Next Steps

So, there was one Seeking Alpha link I forgot to drop before — the official TopRanked.io Seeking Alpha Affiliates Review. Maybe go check that out if you still need more details.

Otherwise, if you know what’s good for you, head here to sign up with Seeking Alpha affiliates today.

Affiliate News Takeaways

Another week, another round of AI product announcements.

First up, we’ve got another drop from everyone’s favorite grifter, Scam Altman.

GPT-4.5 rollout to plus users has started

will complete within the next few days

— Sam Altman (@sama) March 5, 2025

And just in case you weren’t aware, you should definitely be scared…

trying GPT-4.5 has been much more of a "feel the AGI" moment among high-taste testers than i expected!

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 17, 2025

That’s right. It’s time to be “a little bit scared” — them “high-taste testers” (whatever the eff that’s meant to mean) are feeling the AGI mojo.

Oh, and speaking of being a little bit scared, here’s what else dropped this week:

Yep. In its eternal quest to become the only website anyone visits, Big G is cranking things up another notch and launching its “AI Mode”.

But before we go getting too scared, I think we should stop and ask ourselves something.

Do people really want this?

I mean, take a look at this — the example Google’s thrown up on its blog post announcing the new “AI Mode” that’s supposed to show you how brilliant this new mode is.

And guess what!?

If I go ask the exact same thing to Microsoft’s Sydney/Bing/Copilot/whatever it’s calling itself these days, guess what!?!?

It answers with a pretty satisfactory answer.

So here’s my theory — (most) people don’t actually want any of this stuff. After all, if they did, then why is Bing still unable to capture more than 4% of the search engine market?

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share

It’s not like Bing didn’t get a whole bunch of eyeballs on its fancy new “AI Mode” search engine back in the day. If you cast your mind back to that time when we did a NordVPN affiliate program review, you might remember it was all the rage at the time.

And yet, here we are, 2 years later, and most people have forgotten about Bing.

So what makes Google’s “AI Mode” any more of a threat?

Oh, wait… that’s right.

They already dominate search. So they can always just force their junk right down their users’ throats.

But, you know what?

They could have done the same thing with AI overviews.

In fact, they kinda did do it with AI overviews.

And you wanna know what the total impact from that has been?

Here are two stats that give us a hint:

• 7% of search requests trigger an AI Overview
• SEO traffic for these search terms is down between 18% to 40%

Now, let’s do some math with those stats.

If you take the worst-case AI Overview scenario (40% SEO traffic drop) and apply it to the 7% of requests getting an AI Overview, you end up with a total hit to all SEO traffic of just 2.8%.

That’s it.

Google’s AI overviews have resulted in a 2.8% drop in SEO traffic to websites in general.

Now, I get that this may be quite different from what some SEO “thought leaders” might have told you. Depending on who you follow, you might have even heard that AI overviews were the death of the web.

But let’s get one thing straight — the average SEO “thought leader” generally seems to overstate the impact of things.

If you don’t believe me, go take a look at some SERP volatility stats.

Notice anything funny?

If you don’t, pay attention to the capital “G”s — each one of those is a Google “Core Update”.

Notice how, 80% of the time, they never really result in any additional SERP volatility over the baseline for the period.

And yet, that doesn’t stop the SEO pundits from telling you that each and every update is causing massive volatility.

I mean, take a look at the November 2024 update — volatility actually dropped immediately after that update rolled out. And yet…

Google November 2024 core update is still causing search ranking volatility 🔥 https://t.co/wnc7CmBU26

— SE Roundtable (@seroundtable) December 4, 2024

What’s worse, there was also a bunch of fearmongering about affiliate sites dying…

And here we are today, one “R.I.P. Affiliate Sites” update later, and affiliate pages are still rampant on Google.

I mean, look at this screenshot from today. I went and did a search for pickleball paddles because… well… I’ve been obsessed with Pickleball ever since our 1xBet Affiliate Program Review edition… and right there at #1 on the SERPs for “best pickleball paddles” is nothing less than an affiliate spam site.

Or, at least, I think it’s an affiliate spam site… but maybe I’m misinterpreting what a page littered with this sort of stuff is…

Anyway, long story short — SEOs tend to overhype/overestimate just about everything. But, when you look at the stats, you end up with a very different story.

Just like we did with the 2.8% impact on SEO traffic from Google’s AI overview.

Now, at this point, I should probably say that I totally get that 2.8% is precisely 2.8 more than 0. So, yeah, I’ll admit it — it’s not exactly nothing.

But, at the same time, it’s not exactly the kinda thing that warrants the sort of “SEO is dead” panic we hear each and every time Bing/Google/OpenAI/Perplexity/whoever announces the impending launch of whatever AI doodad they’ve been cooking up.

And yet, here we are, a billion and one AI panics later, and we’re still getting a billion and one more hot takes about how Google “AI Mode” is going to kill everyone.

Here’s the first paragraph of one of those hot takes: “Your SEO playbook may be expiring soon and that means you must retool your business for your site visitors to actually seek out your website, over relying on Google search results. Yes, the new Google Gemini AI Mode may expire many businesses.”

Sound familiar?

Yeah, we’ve been here before.

In fact, I think we’ve been here at least a dozen times since OpenAI first dropped ChatGPT.

And yet, here we are, 2 and a bit years later, and for some reason we’re still talking about “your SEO playbook”…

…wait… wasn’t the SEO playbook supposed to have gone the way of the dodo when ChatGPT dropped?

Hmm, guess the first 9000 of these “OMG AI KILL ALL” hot takes must have got it wrong.

And yeah, I know. I get it.

Just like AI Overviews killed off 2.8% of SEO traffic, AI Mode will also impact some businesses. So in a way, the fearmongerers are right about Google sneaking up behind you and slipping it in.

But the key word in that last paragraph is “some”.

AI Mode will also impact some businesses.

And by some, I mean AI Mode will probably only impact a tiny percentage of businesses.

And I’m also willing to bet that the impact to that tiny percentage of businesses will be much smaller than people will lead you to believe.

Seriously.

If you need proof, then go take a look at Chegg.

It’s become a bit of a poster child for “companies that should have already been killed by AI”.

For those who don’t know about Chegg, it’s a “homework help” app that helps kids with homework solutions/overviews/basically anything that ChatGPT is perfect for.

In other words, if there was ever a killer ChatGPT application, replacing Chegg is it.

Now, if you read just about anything written on Chegg in recent times, you might think that that’s exactly what happened. Here’s a copy-paste from just one of the many “here’s why Chegg is a warning for companies in the AI era” articles as an example:

“After the pandemic, the online education company Chegg enjoyed a booming market cap, reaching $12 billion at one point. Now, the company is valued at around $159 million – around a 90% decline. Why? Many of Chegg’s users have started using free artificial intelligence (AI) apps instead of paying for Chegg.”

Now, don’t get me wrong — AI is partly to blame for Chegg’s “valuation” tanking by 90%. Everyone bought the AI fearmongering. And thus, everyone assumed Chegg was cooked, so they dumped their stonks.

But before you join the Chegg dumpers in their assumptions, go take a look at this.

That’s the revenue line from Chegg’s income statement.

And on it, we can see Chegg posted revenues of $767 million in 2022 vs today, where its trailing twelve-month revenue is just $618 million.

In other words, Chegg has seen a 20% drop in revenue “because of AI”… apparently.

Now, don’t get me wrong; a 20% drop in revenue is nothing to celebrate.

But it’s also not that bad. After all, if a 20% drop in revenue is the only consequence for a company that’s the poster child for “should have been replaced by AI”, then I think they’re doing okay.

In fact, I think they’re doing better than okay. I mean, if you account for the whole “COVID effect” thing, then Chegg hasn’t really tanked all that much.

What’s this COVID effect thing?

Well, let’s cast our minds back to the days before COVID.

For reference, Chegg was only doing $411 million in revenue at the time.

Then COVID happened and, because Chegg’s an EdTech company, it pumped just as hard as every other “remote” company.

So there’s also a good chance that a big part of its decline is best blamed on the post-COVID effect and has nothing to do with AI.

If you don’t see what I mean here, then go take a look at Peloton as an example of this COVID effect.

Why Peloton specifically?

Well, because I’m pretty sure there’s no AI that replaces putting your ass on a bike and pedalling it (yet), so we can at least eliminate the AI effect here.

And would you look at that.

Peloton’s revenue has declined by over 30% since COVID. That’s even more than Chegg’s has declined!

Hmmm… maybe AI hasn’t been that bad for Chegg after all. At least, not on a fundamental level. (If you’re a shareholder, then yar, AI just destroyed you… or, at least, the AI hype did.)

Takeaway

Pretty much everything above is to say something reasonably simple: Google’s AI Mode is probably way less of a thing than some people would like you to think it is.

Yes, it will affect a few people.

And yes, it will really hurt for a handful of those people.

But, generally speaking, we really shouldn’t expect it to destroy all that much.

AI that’s already in the wild’s having much less of an impact than some people would like you to believe. And there’s no reason to think “AI Mode” will be any different.

So if you were thinking it was too late to start an SEO strategy to promote something like Seeking Alpha, then think again. Seeking Alpha is exactly the sort of thing that real people want. And those real people will probably still end up on your website. Just don’t forget to include your Seeking Alpha affiliate links.

Closing Thought

If you need to know one thing about me, it’s that I’m a bit of a degen.

And not in the “crypto go brrr” kinda way (I’ve already got Seeking Alpha to set me on the straight and narrow here).

More in the “Andy Reid to finish an entire game without once thinking about cheeseburgers (+100000)” prop bet kinda way.

Oh wait… maybe that wouldn’t be such a crazy bet after all.

Anyway… point I’m trying to make is, I’m usually pretty bad at this sports betting stuff.

So, to try and fix that up, I subscribed to a hot little newsletter called What Are the Odds? It’s great — predictions, odds… everything you need to stop being a degen and start being a real player.

And the best part is that they do a closing thought just like we do.

So this week, I’m stealing their closing thought. (But I think it’s cool since they stole it from Socrates.)

I think that’s some pretty good advice.

After all, why bother wasting energy on trying to fight something when you could turn that energy toward creating something?

Makes a lot of sense.

Oh, and speaking of building the new… ever thought of building new wealth for yourself AND your audience? Then the Seeking Alpha affiliate program is probably right for you.

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(Featured image by SevenStorm JUHASZIMRUS via Pexels)

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This article may include forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements generally are identified by the words “believe,” “project,” “estimate,” “become,” “plan,” “will,” and similar expressions. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks as well as uncertainties, including those discussed in the following cautionary statements and elsewhere in this article and on this site. Although the Company may believe that its expectations are based on reasonable assumptions, the actual results that the Company may achieve may differ materially from any forward-looking statements, which reflect the opinions of the management of the Company only as of the date hereof. Additionally, please make sure to read these important disclosures.