Feb 27, 2026
Written by
CJ
Trust, fairness, and mutual benefit are critical elements of the affiliate ecosystem, essential for the business to thrive. Publisher quality levels and attempted fraud are omnipresent considerations across all marketing and media investment, not just affiliate. Brands working independently or with networks lacking robust protections face estimates of fraudulent traffic running at 20% or more.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Since affiliate marketing emerged in the late 1990s, CJ has been at the forefront of fraud monitoring, detection, and remediation. Detecting and preventing fraud are core to our industry, our offering, and our trust relationships with publishers and advertisers. We believe network quality is a competitive advantage for our advertisers and publishers, and we invest $millions every year in this key element of our market offerings.
Robust network quality isn't overhead. It's infrastructure. It's the foundation that allows you to scale confidently, protect brand equity, and ensure that every partnership dollar drives legitimate results.
Compliance standards can vary from market to market. Every company must set its own compliance framework and standards and ensure its policies reflect the laws in each market. It’s also extremely valuable to work with partners that understand the importance of compliance and have experience in the markets in which you compete. Working with an affiliate network with experience in all leading affiliate markets helps ensure that the people working on your business understand the importance of compliance and work hard to reflect your standards.
Here's something worth knowing: some of the most recognized names in affiliate marketing have no dedicated network quality team. They've built their platforms on technology alone, assuming algorithms can replace human judgment and investigative expertise. For many advertisers, that assumption hasn't held up. When new advertisers migrate to CJ, we consistently find that an average of 5% of publishers in their previous programs are flagged for fraud. On average, brands migrating to CJ can redirect 9.3% of their budget to outstanding publishers instead of fraudsters.
Network quality isn't a single problem with a single solution. It's a complex landscape spanning traffic integrity, attribution accuracy, brand safety, regulatory compliance, publisher vetting, and financial oversight. At CJ, network quality spans capabilities far beyond our dedicated Network Quality department, including elements of individual program tracking, program management, category-specific program compliance services, and finance processes.
Because affiliate marketing programs are usually tied to concrete outcomes, it’s easy to argue that affiliate offers far fewer opportunities for fraud than less accountable digital media. Still, there are multiple ways that bad actors try to manipulate systems and data.
At the traffic level, fraudulent publishers deploy increasingly sophisticated methods, including bot traffic that mimics human behavior, cookie stuffing that claims credit for organic sales, and undisclosed incentivized clicks. Even legitimate traffic can be corrupted through attribution manipulation.
The brand and regulatory risks are equally significant. Affiliates function as extensions of your brand, and misleading claims, unauthorized asset usage, or placement on inappropriate sites create reputational exposure that falls squarely on you. Meanwhile, the compliance landscape has grown substantially more complex, with GDPR, CCPA, and industry-specific regulations creating a patchwork of requirements that vary by jurisdiction and carry meaningful consequences for violations. Overall, guidelines and regulations are getting more aggressive, and advertisers have a responsibility to adapt their program rules and standards to these changes.
Publisher vetting and ongoing monitoring form the operational backbone of quality protection. Effective vetting requires identity verification, business legitimacy checks, and historical performance analysis, but point-in-time approval isn't sufficient. Publishers who passed screening two years ago may not meet current standards, and continuous oversight catches both bad actors exploiting gaps and good partners making honest mistakes that need correction. Financial compliance adds another critical layer, with tax documentation, anti-money laundering considerations, and payment fraud detection all requiring systematic attention.
Each category represents a distinct discipline, and weakness in any single area can undermine an otherwise strong program.
CJ doesn't rely on a single solution. We've built a multi-layered defense system because we understand that fraudsters are sophisticated, adaptive, and persistent.
The first layer consists of proprietary AI and machine learning. Our Data Science team has developed advanced AI models specifically designed to detect fraud patterns that human analysts couldn't catch at scale. These models learn and adapt, getting more effective with every threat they neutralize.
The second layer incorporates independent third-party data sources, giving our models broader and more comprehensive perspective. This level of integration isn't standard practice in the industry because it requires enormous ongoing investment. We maintain it because the results justify the effort.
The third layer is where CJ's approach stands apart: the industry's largest affiliate network quality team. Trained investigators and fraud specialists examine flagged accounts, communicate with partners, and make informed decisions that algorithms alone cannot make. When a publisher receives a high fraud probability score, we don't automate a response. We investigate, verify, and, when necessary, we remove them permanently. More than 1,300 publishers are delisted from the CJ network every year.
Collectively, these protections, the strength and scale of the CJ network, and our proprietary data help us detect issues others can't, and protect the whole network based on information that may be initially found within one or just a few programs. Before it spreads.
Unlike platforms that focus on final conversions alone, CJ takes a full-funnel approach to fraud detection. We monitor multiple metrics throughout the customer journey because sophisticated fraudsters know how to game single-metric systems. By tracking performance across the entire funnel, we identify manipulation that narrower approaches miss.
Our Customer Journey Insights capability gives clients and program managers full visibility into the digital customer journey, including both affiliate and non-affiliate touchpoints. This enables us to understand how affiliates contribute to actions at various stages of the journey, understand the role of affiliate in transactions that aren't credited to affiliate, and monitor touchpoints to gain deeper visibility into publisher assist rates.
Fraud doesn't respect national borders, and neither does our team. CJ's network quality operation is international by design, with expertise spanning multiple regions. While CJ does not offer legal review or advice, our experience with programs in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC means we have extensive history working within the program rules and guidelines that advertiser legal teams set.
The brands that treat network quality as a strategic asset rather than an operational expense are the ones building affiliate programs that deliver sustainable, defensible results. They're attracting better publishers, maintaining cleaner data, and scaling with confidence.
Fraud protection isn't a feature you add on. It's the foundation of a trustworthy affiliate program. CJ has spent more than 25 years building the most comprehensive fraud detection and network quality operation in the industry because we believe that foundation matters. The question for any brand serious about affiliate marketing isn't whether robust network quality is worth the investment. It's whether you can build a program that lasts without it.
To learn more about our network quality approach, get in touch with your CJ contact.
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