Links and domains

Three kinds of domain can carry your program, each with one job. A hostname can serve exactly one of them, and the dashboard checks that before asking you to touch DNS.

Partner links

Out of the box a partner's link is your site with their handle on it: yoursite.com/?ref=alice. It goes wherever they point it (their group's landing URL, or any page when custom links are enabled), and the parameter name is yours to change under Program settings, Attribution.

Partners can also create custom links with their own values for campaign tracking, unless you switch that off. Coupon-only programs can hide links in the portal entirely.

Short-link domains

Program settings, Domains, Short-link domains. Add refer.yourdomain.com and every partner also gets refer.yourdomain.com/alice: shorter, branded, and clean in a bio or a podcast read. Both forms track identically; the short link records the click server-side and forwards to your site with the referral attached.

A short link must never break: an unknown handle or a paused partner still forwards to your site, just untracked. You can add several short-link domains; each partner link shows every form with a copy button.

The portal on your own domain

Program settings, Domains, Portal domain. Your portal starts at yourprogram.affiliaterail.io and keeps working there forever; adding affiliates.yourdomain.com puts the same portal on your name. One record at the place you bought your domain, then the dashboard walks the verification. Budget ten minutes, most of it waiting.

A tracker host of your own

Insights, Attribution health, Your own tracker host. Add something like go.yourdomain.com and the script and its click endpoint are served from your own name. Two things improve:

• The referral cookie is set by the server on your registrable domain, so Safari honours your full attribution window instead of capping a script-set cookie at seven days.
• Nothing about tracking is third-party any more, so content blockers have nothing to match.

Once verified, the install snippet in the dashboard switches to your host automatically; update the tag on your site when convenient.

Verification, step by step

Every domain goes through the same three steps, and the badge on the row says exactly where it stands:

1. Needs verification: prove the name is yours (a TXT record).
2. Waiting for DNS: point the name at us (a CNAME).
3. Waiting for the certificate: automatic once DNS resolves.

then Live. The records to add are shown in a copyable table. If your DNS is on Cloudflare, set the record to DNS only (the grey cloud, proxy off): a proxied record hides the target and the certificate cannot issue.