Company
About LinksWatcher
Born from a $12,000 mistake. Built to make sure it never happens to you.
The Indie Hacker Behind the Mission
I'm Amine LAL. I've been building products on the internet for years — writing code, shipping fast, iterating in public. When I started monetizing content through affiliate links, I assumed the system worked. After all, you paste a link, someone clicks, you earn a commission. Simple, right?
Then I audited my own links. What I found changed everything.
The Discovery: Zombie Pages
Out of 340 affiliate links across my projects, 53 were pointing to products that no longer existed. Out of stock. Discontinued. Redirected to completely different items. These weren't broken links — the pages still loaded. The URLs returned HTTP 200. Every link checker on the market said they were fine.
But they weren't fine. They were Zombie Pages — technically alive, commercially dead. Every visitor who clicked one of these links was a lost commission. Based on my traffic data, those 53 dead links were costing me an estimated $12,000 per year in lost revenue.
And I hadn't noticed for months.
Why Traditional Tools Fail
Link checkers monitor HTTP status codes. If a page returns 200, it's "alive." But Amazon doesn't return a 404 when a product goes out of stock. Neither does AliExpress. Neither does Walmart. The page stays up, the buy button disappears or changes to "See all buying options" or "Currently unavailable" — and your affiliate link silently stops earning.
No API can reliably detect this across every marketplace, every locale, every product category. The DOM structures change constantly. CSS class names rotate. Localized text varies by region. The only way to truly know if a product is buyable is to look at it the way a human would.
The Solution: AI That Sees
LinksWatcher uses a proprietary AI Vision engine. We don't just crawl your links — we render the full page, take a screenshot, and let GPT-4o Vision analyze the visual state of the product. Is there a price displayed? Is the "Add to Cart" button present? Does the page show "Currently unavailable"?
This approach works across every marketplace, every language, every layout change. When Amazon rearranges their product page — and they do it constantly — our AI adapts in real time. No selectors to update. No regexes to maintain. Just visual intelligence.
Our Mission
The affiliate economy moves $15 billion per year. Content creators, bloggers, YouTubers, and niche site builders depend on it. Yet the industry has no reliable infrastructure for monitoring whether the products being promoted are actually available for purchase.
LinksWatcher exists to fix this. We believe every creator deserves to know — in real time — if their revenue is leaking through Zombie Pages. We believe the tools should be affordable enough that a solo blogger can use them, and powerful enough that a media company trusts them.
We're building the monitoring layer that the affiliate industry should have had from day one.