IAB Australia’s 2026 Report Confirms What Most Brands Already Know: Affiliate Works

According to the IAB Australia 2026 Affiliate and Partnership Marketing State of the Nation Report, which was released on April 21 at the annual Affiliate and Partnership Marketing Summit in Sydney, 42% of advertisers using the channel have increased their investment over the past year, while two thirds of publishers reported revenue growth. Nine out of ten respondents expected affiliate marketing’s importance to their business outcomes to increase.

This ahead of the upcoming UK APMA State of the Nation report being delivered on the 30 April this week lend itself to confirm confidence in the Affiliate Industry as a growth sector as a whole. It’s a testament to a confident set of findings for a channel that spent much of the last two years defending its seat at the marketing table while brands chased retail media and AI-driven acquisition experiments.

The report, now in its eighth year, drew on responses from 123 industry professionals across agencies, advertisers, publishers, and affiliate partners surveyed during March and April 2026. The IAB’s Affiliate and Partnership Marketing Working Group, which includes representatives from impact.com, Partnerize, Rakuten, Skimlinks, Commission Factory, and WPP Media, produced the research as part of the annual Sydney summit program.

Travel Overtakes Retail as the Top Publisher Category

Retail and fashion continue to dominate on the advertiser side, maintaining their position as the top categories running affiliate programs. But the publisher picture has shifted. Travel has overtaken both to become the highest-performing vertical for publishers in 2026, a notable move that reflects a combination of post-pandemic demand recovery and the broader maturity of travel affiliate programs as a commission-generating category. This mirrors what US data has already shown, where travel’s market share surged 80% between 2021 and 2024.

The small publisher presence in the channel also grew. Publishers with fewer than 50 employees now account for 58% of those active in affiliate and partnership marketing, up from 49% the previous year. That shift suggests the channel is increasingly accessible to independent operators and boutique content businesses, not just large media groups.

On the advertiser side, the split between in-house management and network usage has rebalanced. While 42% still manage programs in house, the proportion using affiliate networks jumped to 29% from 19% the year before, a meaningful shift toward third-party infrastructure.

AI Disruption Is the Industry’s Most Pressing Shared Concern

The headline sentiment in the report is positive, but it arrives alongside a clear warning. Publishers told the IAB they are experiencing direct disruption from search algorithm changes and the growing influence of AI on how consumers discover and click through to products. Both forces are challenging the last-click attribution models that most affiliate programs still rely on.

The report states that advertisers and publishers alike are beginning to view visibility in AI-driven discovery environments as a precondition for affiliate program success, not a nice-to-have. That framing carries weight. If your products are not surfacing in AI-generated responses during the consideration phase, your affiliates face an increasingly uphill task regardless of how well their own content performs.

We have covered the mechanics of this challenge in depth, including how AI search is compressing the affiliate referral window, what agentic commerce means for attribution, and the practical steps affiliate managers are taking to build LLM visibility strategies. The Australian data gives those concerns institutional backing.

Gai Le Roy, CEO of IAB Australia, was direct on saying: “The clear ask of the IAB as an industry body for future success is to develop resources and education to help the industry understand the impact and opportunities of AI.“

Five Areas Where the Industry Needs to Move

The report identifies five specific areas where advertisers and publishers said they need support: improving measurement, attribution, and proof of incrementallity; repositioning affiliate as a full-funnel channel rather than a conversion closer; strengthening trust and governance standards; improving collaboration and industry education; and developing more sophisticated data, targeting, and technology capabilities.

For affiliate program managers, that list is also a priority checklist for 2026 in the UK. The measurement and incrementality point is particularly pressing. Brands that cannot demonstrate affiliate’s contribution beyond last-click are the first to have budgets reallocated when hard questions get asked. Understanding what incrementality actually means for your program and how to prove it to finance stakeholders is no longer optional work but must be part of every day communication internally with collaborative departments.

Three Takeaways for Affiliate Managers

If you are running a program in any market, not just Australia, this report offers three practical pressure points worth acting on now.

The network adoption shift is worth watching. The jump from 19% to 29% of advertisers using networks rather than managing in house is not a coincidence. As measurement complexity grows and AI introduces new tracking variables, brands are opting for managed infrastructure over solo operation. If your program sits inside a lean in-house setup, the case for platform support has rarely been stronger.

Travel’s rise to the top publisher category signals an opportunity. If your program operates in travel, hospitality, or experiences, the publisher base is actively growing. Now is a strong time to revisit your publisher recruitment strategy and commission structure in this vertical.

The AI visibility question is no longer speculative. The IAB’s finding that both brands and publishers see AI discovery as important to affiliate program success aligns with what managers are already doing to build GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO strategies into their partner content frameworks. If you have not started that conversation with your top-performing content partners, this report provides the business case to open it.

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Cited source: iabaustralia.com.au/news/brands-employing-affiliate-and-partnership-marketing-to-elevate-revenue-generation-capabilities-according-to-new-iab-state-of-nation-report