HUBLO Revenue Integrity Monitor

Description

A link checker asks one question: does this URL answer? That question misses the way affiliate revenue usually breaks.

The link opens. The merchant answers 200 OK. The product page loads. And the affiliate ID that tells the merchant whose account to credit is no longer in the URL that arrives — so every click from that page earns nothing, and no monitoring tool says a word about it.

HUBLO Revenue Integrity Monitor audits your site for that class of failure.

The failure this exists to catch

HTTP status: 200 OK
Merchant reachable: YES
Affiliate tracking ID: MISSING
Result: REVENUE AT RISK

What it checks

Each monetized link is treated as a protected revenue path — the page, the link element, the redirect chain, the tracking that has to survive it, and the merchant at the end. Eight detectors compare the current state against a recorded good state:

1. Revenue Element Missing — the CTA or affiliate link is no longer on the page.
2. Destination Drift — the link now ends up somewhere else, including the classic case where a discontinued product page silently becomes the merchant home page.
3. Tracking Parameter Integrity — the affiliate ID that reaches the merchant went missing, or changed to a different account.
4. Redirect Chain Drift — the redirect loops, or never resolves.
5. Revenue Destination Failure — the destination is genuinely gone or erroring.
6. Indexability Failure — a money page picked up a noindex.
7. Canonical Drift — the canonical URL changed or now points at another domain.
8. Revenue Element Drift — the link’s wording or its sponsored markup changed.

Alerts you can actually trust

Most link monitoring becomes useless the same way: it reports every 403, every rate limit and every timeout as “broken”, the real failures get buried, and people stop reading the alerts.

This plugin keeps those cases separate on purpose.

• A bot filter or WAF answering 403 is reported as automated verification was blocked — not as a broken link.
• A 429 rate limit causes a backoff, not an alert.
• A timeout is retried, and a timeout that clears leaves no red incident behind.
• An affiliate network adding a fresh click ID on every request is normal behaviour, not a change.
• Query parameter order, percent-encoding, trailing slashes and http to https are all normalized before anything is compared.

Only two internal states are ever allowed to reach you as Revenue At Risk, and both of them require a reachable destination, a known-good baseline and a consistent result across retries.

Auto Discovery

You do not configure selectors, redirect hops or parameter policies to get started. Discovery reads your published content and picks out what looks monetized — links managed by PrettyLinks or ThirstyAffiliates, links marked rel="sponsored", links carrying known affiliate parameters, links through affiliate networks, and calls to action on review and comparison pages.

It is tuned for precision rather than coverage. High-confidence paths are recommended; everything else is kept as a candidate and stays out of your way.

Fix the safe ones in one click

Finding a broken revenue path and then leaving you to hunt for it is only half a job. Where the plugin can prove — from a recorded good state, not from a guess — exactly what a link used to be, it offers to put it back.

You see the change before it happens: what will be edited, what it is now, what it will become, where the value came from, and that you can undo it. Then it is applied, the path is checked again immediately, and you are told which of three things happened: fixed and verified, applied but still failing, or failed with nothing changed. There is no fourth outcome where something quietly went wrong.

The undo covers the repair this plugin most recently made to a path. If a newer repair has since been applied to the same path, the older one is no longer undone automatically, because restoring it would discard the newer change.

There is no cap. One issue at a time, as many times as you need.

Three repairs are offered, and only three:

• an affiliate parameter that vanished from a link in your content;
• the destination recorded inside PrettyLinks or ThirstyAffiliates, written back through the plugin that owns it;
• disclosure attributes such as rel="sponsored" that were dropped from a link.

Everything else is a guided fix — the plugin tells you where the setting lives and which plugin owns it — or needs review, and says why. An affiliate ID that changed rather than vanished is left alone, because that is usually somebody moving accounts on purpose. Two links on a page pointing at the same place are left alone, because there is no way to tell which one you meant. A link your theme renders is left alone, because it is not in your content. A check that was blocked or rate limited never produces a repair at all.

Issues explained in plain language

Every issue answers, on one screen: what happened, why it can cost you money, what it was before, what it is now, when it was last known good, when it first failed, and what to do next. Response codes, redirect hops and resolution scores are all there, under Technical Details, for when you want them.

Works with

• PrettyLinks — cloaked links are matched to the link they manage, so an incident can say the configured target changed rather than just “a link changed”.
• ThirstyAffiliates — the same, using the managed link’s own post ID as identity.
• Neither is required. Plain affiliate links in your content are supported on their own.

Built for large sites

Discovery reads stored content and makes no outbound requests, so it runs at the size of a real content site. Audits are chunked and resumable: closing the tab costs you one step, not the run. Outbound requests are spaced out per destination and capped per run, so an audit can never turn into a flood at a merchant.

Privacy

No account, no API key, no telemetry, no external service. Requests go to your own pages and to the destinations your links already point at. Your content, your findings and your affiliate IDs stay inside your own WordPress installation.

Safety

Addresses inside your own network — loopback, private ranges, link-local and cloud metadata endpoints — are refused, and every redirect hop is validated again, so a link in a post cannot be used to make your server reach something it should not.

Auditing and monitoring are read-only: Discovery, the eight detectors and every scheduled or on-demand check only read your pages and store findings. Nothing is written, deleted or rewritten by the audit itself.

The one exception is Quick Fix, described above, and it only runs when you click it. Quick Fix never runs on its own: you always see the exact before/after change first, you press Apply yourself, and you can press Undo afterwards to put the previous value back. It can write to three kinds of target, and only these three: the affiliate parameter or disclosure attribute inside a link in your post content, or the destination URL stored by PrettyLinks or ThirstyAffiliates for a link they manage. It never touches anything else — no other post fields, no theme files, no other plugin’s settings, and no site outside your own.

Free and Pro

This download is the complete Revenue Integrity Audit. All eight detectors, unlimited revenue paths, every finding visible with its evidence, Recheck, Accept New Baseline, Mark Expected, and CSV export. Nothing expires, nothing is capped, and no feature is switched off waiting for a licence.

A separately distributed Pro edition does a different job — Continuous Protection: scheduled monitoring, automatic re-checks of the affected paths straight after a WordPress, plugin or theme update, correlation of what changed around the time a path broke, long incident history, advanced tracking and merchant policies, bulk actions and notifications. It is not bundled inside this plugin, and this plugin works fully without it.

Languages

Every user-facing string goes through WordPress’s translation functions, so the plugin can be translated into any locale without a code change. Translations are hosted on translate.wordpress.org and installed as language packs; none are bundled in this download.