5 Best Affiliate Recruitment Tools (From an Affiliate Veteran)

I’ve been in the affiliate marketing industry for about 7 years now, first as an affiliate, and now for the last few years growing affiliate programs as a CMO, then with our agency managing client programs, and now, growing our own affiliate software.

I’ve spent probably thousands of hours searching for affiliates across every channel from Google, to YouTube, to TikTok, to Telegram, FB Groups, Skool community owners, and more.

And the process was frustratingly painful. 

Now, software exists with AI to automate a lot of the manual work that years ago, had to be done manually. If you’re not using these software tools to save you time finding affiliates to recruit, then you’re falling behind.

Overall, my view is that the best tool for recruiting affiliates is AffiliateFinder.ai.

This is because the tool focuses specifically on your brand, and finds the top affiliates actively promoting your competitors, and the top content creators in your niche - rather than giving you a database of random affiliates. It’s specifically set up for your affiliate recruitment needs, and designed to save you manual time.

But, to be impartial, I’ve evaluated the features of other options and broken them down in this article, so you can decide what’s best for you.

Comparing the different affiliate recruitment software

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1 - AffiliateFinder.ai - Best Overall

Pros:

• Discovers the top affiliates you should focus on recruiting
• Focus around active affiliates promoting your competitors for quick wins
• Enriches YouTube emails instantly to save you time breaking Captchas
• Generates AI personalized outreach templates

Cons:

• It only helps you recruit affiliates, but you’ll need to track sales in your affiliate network or software
• Newer product, so it doesn’t have 10+ years of history

AffiliateFinder.ai solves a specific problem affiliate managers face daily: spending 5-10 hours weekly manually searching for affiliates who might be interested in your program. 

Instead of this guesswork, AffiliateFinder identifies content creators already promoting similar products and actively generating sales.

For example, I input AffiliateFinder into AffiliateFinder itself (meta, I know), and it found 1,480 affiliates promoting similar products across YouTube, Google, and more:

Here’s a usecase example: 

Let’s say you manage affiliates for a project management SaaS tool, like ClickUp. (I’ll use a SaaS example because I have most of my experience in SaaS affiliate programs, but it works the same if you’re a DTC ecomm brand, or in iGaming, etc.)

You input your top competitors (Monday.com, Asana, Trello). 

Within minutes, AffiliateFinder.ai returns 150+ YouTubers, bloggers, and review sites actively promoting them with affiliate links. Each affiliate shows their audience size, engagement rates, their traffic, and you can get their email with one click.

Then, AffiliateFinder refreshes every 7 days to find the newest affiliates promoting your competitor, and the newest creating content across social media on your topics. Then you simply decide which ones you want to outreach, enrich their emails within the tool, and outreach them.

The YouTube email enriching is especially useful. Manually fetching a YouTuber’s email often takes 2-3 minutes to break the Captcha, so clicking a button and instantly getting their email is a big time-saver.

There’s a free trial too, so you can try AffiliateFinder risk-free.

The Pro plan at $99/month, and includes unlimited affiliates, 150 monthly email enrichments, and the monitoring of up to 5 competitors. The Growth plan is $249/mo and includes more competitor and topic monitoring, 500 email enrichments, and API access.

At these prices, if it even helps you recruit a couple of affiliates per month, this can be a 50x+ ROI. You can read other reviews on AffiliateFinder, such as this one on increasing.com, for more information.

2 - Endorsely - Best For SaaS Affiliate Recruitment

Pros:

• Free until $1,000 in affiliate revenue
• Full affiliate tracking solution, beyond the partner recruitment features

Cons:

• Can only use it if you’re a SaaS or use Stripe
• Fewer discovery features than dedicated tools

Endorsely is a free all-in-one affiliate software for SaaS specifically, and it also includes affiliate recruitment features.

It’s free until you reach $1,000 in affiliate revenue, so if you’re a brand new startup you can start for free (though you don’t get access to all the premium features, like hosting the program on your custom domain).

You can set up the tracking by integrating with Stripe and installing the javascript snippet on your website. It takes around 15 minutes. At AffiliateFinder, we use Endorsely for hosting our affiliate program, and it works well for us.

The Endorsely affiliate recruitment feature is similar in that it finds affiliates promoting competitors, and websites and YouTubers who have created content on your topic. So if you’re a SaaS, it’s a great option for you to help you find affiliates.

Because it’s built for SaaS, you get features for this, like measuring which affiliates are converting more free trials into paid customers, LTV for customers referred by specific affiliates, and the EPC for specific SaaS affiliates. This lets you prioritize customers not just by total conversions, but by who is sending high-quality customers that don’t churn. 

However, it’s not a specialist affiliate recruitment platform, but part of a broader tracking and payouts system.

Endorsely has also written their own article on affiliate recruitment software, which is worth reading!

3 - Ahrefs - Best for SEO Teams

Pros:

• Identifies affiliates through backlinks
• Link Intersect feature finds partners linking to multiple competitors

Cons:

• Requires SEO knowledge to use effectively
• Not purpose-built for affiliate recruitment

Ahrefs is my personal favorite SEO tool, along with other tools like Answer Socrates. It’s fantastic for keyword research, and it also has a number of tools which you can use for finding affiliate websites to recruit.

Particularly, it excels at finding affiliate publishers who link to multiple competitors, who are more likely to promote you as well. You can use the Link Intersect to identify the specific websites that link to 3+ competitors, and focus on these.

The Backlinks report provides detailed metrics for evaluating affiliate quality: Domain Rating indicates site authority, organic traffic estimates audience size, and referring domains.

If you filter a competitor’s backlink profile by the referral code used by the affiliate network or software they use, you can get a list of all the websites linking with an affiliate link to that website. Then you can outreach this list of websites to join your program.

For example, here is an SEO tool called SurferSEO, and I’ve filtered their backlink by the referral code used in their software. This now finds 682 links with the affiliate code from websites to them, who are all affiliates:

This is something AffiliateFinder also does, and filters for all major affiliate networks for all your competitors automatically to find the affiliate websites linking to them, and recommends the top prospects for you.

Also, you’ll need SEO knowledge to understand the SEO, backlink and traffic data. And, Ahrefs only helps find website publisher affiliates, so if you want YouTubers, Instagram, TikTok and other types of affiliates, you’ll need another tool.

4 - Pitchbox - Enterprise-level email outreach tool

Pros:

• Manages multiple client campaigns simultaneously
• OEP™ scoring prioritizes high-value prospects

Cons:

• Complex interface requires training
• Expensive for single-brand use

Pitchbox is the tool used by most SEO and link-building agencies, and I’ve used it myself for building links. It’s the best link-building SEO tool around, and can also be used to find and recruit affiliates.

It’s usecase in affiliate recruitment is that there is a “Product Review” feature for your campaigns. If you use this, it uses search operators to find all the websites that have reviewed a competitor on Google, and helps you outreach them to get them to review you, too.

Pitchbox uses Ahrefs, Moz and Semrush data to give very accurate traffic data, domain authority, and spam score data so you can remove spammy sites you don’t want to feature on.

Once you’ve found the websites you want to outreach, Pitchbox has built-in AI email generation to help write your outreach sequences for you.

So, if you are focusing on websites only, Pitchbox can help you outreach affiliates here. But, if you want to find affiliate partners beyond Google and SEO, it won’t work for you.

Pricing starts at $165/month for the Pro plan, and $550+ for the more advanced features. If you’re an agency that does backlink outreach already then it’s a great option for adding affiliate recruitment onto this, but if you need a more specialist tool for growing your affiliate program, it might not work for you.

5 - Semrush - Also an SEO tool, but useful for affiliate outreach

Pros:

• Backlink tools help you find affiliates
• Full SEO suite beyond the affiliate recruitment parts (same as Ahrefs also has)

Cons:

• Requires some SEO knowledge to make full use of it
• No specific affiliate finding features - they’re SEO features that you can also use to find website partners

Semrush is technically a full-scale digital marketing solution, but it’s roots are as an SEO tool.

You can use it in a similar way to Ahrefs, to find affiliate links via the backlink filtering, as well as the keyword research features to find which affiliates are ranking for the keywords you want to drive traffic from.

If you search your main product review, or “best [product]” keywords, you’ll find the websites ranking, so you can outreach them.

And, you can filter your competitors’ backlink profiles for the referral code from their affiliate network to find their active website affiliates.

Both Ahrefs and Semrush have good organic traffic estimates you can use to see how popular a website is, and how much traffic they can send you.

And the Related Domains feature is useful as a kind of “lookalike affiliate finder” as if you your ideal affiliate into this, it can identify more similar websites to this.

However, as with Ahrefs, it’s only really for finding affiliate websites, rather than other types of affiliates. It’s also more manual effort to find which affiliate network your competitor is on, and find that referral code, versus a tool like AffiliateFinder that autoamtically identifies this, filters out bad-quality affiliates, and just shows you your best fits.

At $139.95/month for the Pro plan, Semrush costs more than dedicated affiliate tools but provides value across different marketing areas, like SEO mostly - but also PPC and other types of content creation. 

Why You Need Affiliate Recruitment Software

If you’re serious about scaling your affiliate program, then you need more affiliates. And if you want to save dozens of hours every month manually searching for the right partners, you’ll need a software that automates this for you.

Manually searching to find affiliate partners takes a LONG time:

1. First, discovery typically requires 10-20 hours monthly searching through Google results, social media, and YouTube to find potential partners. 
2. Second, enrichment takes another 5-10 hours finding contact information, often with 70% of emails being generic info@ addresses. 
3. Third, personalized outreach requires 30 minutes per prospect to research their content and craft relevant messages.

Recruitment tools compress this 40-hour process into 2-4 hours monthly while often getting you better results. 

Often, they find influencers and affiliates you wouldn’t surface manually, and if they help you recruit even one extra affiliate per month who drives $5,000 in monthly sales, then this is a huge ROI over time. Over 12 months, that difference compounds into hundreds of thousands in additional revenue.

FAQs

How do I choose between these tools if I'm just starting with affiliate marketing?

If you're completely new to affiliate marketing and run a SaaS business, start with Endorsely's free tier to test the channel without financial commitment, or if in e-commerce, there are free beginner tools like GoAffPro. 

If you have an existing affiliate program and want to scale partner recruitment, AffiliateFinder.ai helps you find more potential affiliates promoting your competitors, and big influencers in your niche, and costs $99/month.

Can these tools guarantee I'll find affiliates who actually convert?

No tool guarantees conversion, but they dramatically improve probability by identifying affiliates already successful in your niche. When AffiliateFinder.ai shows you someone actively promoting three competitors, they've proven they can drive sales for products like yours. 

This eliminates a lot of the guesswork about who might be interested, and if you can offer these affiliates a good deal, there’s a much higher chance they’ll respond (as long as they don’t have exclusivity agreements with your competitors). Response rates can climb to 40%+ for these types of partners.

What if I already have an affiliate network like ShareASale or Impact?

Affiliate recruitment tools complement rather than replace affiliate networks. Networks provide the infrastructure for tracking, payments, and compliance, and help you find an initial flow of affiliates that are already within their network. Recruitment tools find partners that are not actively within their network, that you can onboard into your affiliate network or tracking software. This hybrid approach combines passive applications from the network with active recruitment of high-value partners who wouldn't otherwise find you.