You know the drill. You open a blank spreadsheet, punch a few keywords into Google, and spend the next three hours clicking through blogs trying to answer one question: is this affiliate actually a good fit for my brand?

Now do that a few hundred more times. That's the part of the job nobody puts in the affiliate manager job description, and it's where most recruitment efforts quietly die.

AI affiliate recruitment flips that. Instead of you doing the searching and the judging, an AI agent reads your website, builds a profile of your brand, and scores hundreds of potential partners for fit in about five minutes. I've been a power user of Alfie for the last three months, and I recently sat down with Dan Cseko, CTO at XPFlow and the guy who has spent the last 18 months building Alfie, on the School of Chaos podcast to get under the hood. Here's what he told me.

Watch the full conversation: AI Finds Hundreds of Perfect Affiliate Partners in Minutes 

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It takes over the two most time-consuming parts of recruitment: finding candidates and deciding whether each one is worth your time. That second part is the real grind, and it's exactly what Dan's team studied before writing a line of code.

We looked at what some of the best affiliate managers are doing, where they were spending their time, which is searching through these affiliates, trying to figure out, "Is this a great match for my brand? Is this where I wanna be?"

- Dan Cseko, CTO at XPFlow

Here's the truth: the industry doesn't need another affiliate network. It needs something that drives affiliate in the right direction. Brands are pouring more money into this channel every year (US advertisers spent $12.42 billion on affiliate in 2025 and are projected to hit $13.81 billion in 2026, according to eMarketer via Shopify), yet most affiliate managers still recruit like it's 2012.

And the time you save matters. Modash's 2026 survey found that brands that are very involved with their affiliates average 71.5% active affiliates, compared to 10% for hands-off programs. Every hour you stop spending on Google searches is an hour you can spend actually building relationships with partners.

Because your website already tells the AI who you are, what you sell, and who buys from you. That's everything it needs to judge fit, and it means the results are built around your brand instead of a generic category list.

Alfie's built around this idea of tailoring results to you. When you put your URL in, we send our agents off and we trawl through your site and we build up an advertiser profile.

- Dan Cseko

Here is how the process works, start to finish:

Every time I run a new brand through it, the speed still gets me. URL in, a few questions answered, and I'm looking at hundreds of targets before my coffee cools. If you want to see it live, the team walks through a full campaign build on the How to Alfie page.

Alfie searches two places at once: the open web and a curated database of proven affiliates built from the Rolodex of the affiliate managers who work at Alfie. In those five minutes it considers hundreds, and soon thousands, of candidates.

I talk about websites a lot because that's where we started. We started with content. But we're past that now. We're looking at the whole affiliate landscape.

- Dan Cseko

Here's the thing though: you can have all the affiliates in the world. Matching them to your brand is what actually matters. And that's where Alfie is doing better than anything else I'm seeing out there. (If you want the broader landscape, I compared the options in my roundup of affiliate recruitment tools.)

The fit score blends two things: AI judgment guided by detailed instructions on how expert affiliate managers pick partners, and hard metrics like whether an affiliate's traffic is the right size for your brand. The result is a number that tells you how good a match a partner is for you specifically, not how big they are.

Most people prompt AI with a quick one-liner. Dan told me Alfie runs on what are basically entire essays on how to pick out affiliates. That's the expertise of experienced affiliate managers, written down and fed to the agent, so it evaluates partners the way a seasoned recruiter would.

Alfie also weighs metrics it has collected on each affiliate, like traffic. And bigger is not automatically better. A site pulling hundreds of millions of views can be a terrible match for a niche brand.

Instead of just saying "This is the highest grossing affiliate ever," we're able to say, "For your brand and what you're trying to sell and the position of these affiliates, we think you're a really great match."

- Dan Cseko

The goal behind all of it: no wild goose chases and no busy work. Dan put it simply. They want every reply you get to come from an affiliate you actually want in your program, and one you'll have success with.

This is the part that sold me. I've run two completely different brands through Alfie. For a tech gadget brand, CNET scored around 90 out of 100. For a pool supply brand, the same CNET landed in the 60s. Same site, same traffic, totally different value. Alfie learns each brand that quickly.

Pretty much everything before the first email goes out. Here's a side-by-side.

If you're still doing it by hand, my guide on how to find affiliates covers the manual tactics worth keeping.

You get 50 scored affiliate matches the moment you sign up. Alfie used to show five, and Dan admitted people felt a little flat. So now you get 50, something to really sink your teeth into.

That change came straight from affiliate managers using the tool. The team has a roadmap, but they lean hard on first-hand feedback from the people in the trenches doing the work. Dan also said the fit score gets better every week, and he teased a noticeably sharper version that was right around the corner when we recorded.

Inside XPFlow they call it the big three: multiple contacts, sequencing, and advanced search. Advanced search is live now, and agency features are up next.

The big three

Agency features

All of it is tailored to how small and large agencies actually work. If you'd rather hand the whole program to experts, Chief of Chaos, XPFlow's partner recruitment and management agency, runs on Alfie every day.

Because AI is only as good as the expertise you feed it. I like to say Alfie is built by affiliate managers for affiliate managers, and Dan is the guy who turns that expertise into something an agent can run.

Dan has been in tech for about 25 years as a software engineer, in startups, and in e-commerce. He spent a long stretch on the publisher side, including Last.fm, the music social network that laid the groundwork for everything that came after it, Spotify included. When I asked about the beard, he told me there are only two professions that produce one like that: tech and brewing. I had guessed wizard. Turns out wizards don't make a lot these days.

The best products, especially AI products, you need to listen to what the experts are saying, and you need to refine and boil down that process into something that you can feed to an agent.

- Dan Cseko

That's the difference between an AI tool that sounds smart and one that recruits like a pro. For more on where AI fits in the day-to-day, check out how to leverage AI tools for affiliate marketing.

Recruitment used to be a spreadsheet, a Google search bar, and a lot of guessing. Now you can paste your URL, answer a few questions, and get 50 scored matches built around your brand before lunch. The fit score does the judging, so you spend your time on the partners who are actually worth it.

Here's what I want you to do: run your URL through Alfie and look at your top 10 fit scores. Then tell me on LinkedIn which match surprised you most. I'll bet at least one name is a partner you never would have found on your own.

Want the full conversation? Watch the School of Chaos episode with Dan on YouTube. You can reach Dan directly at [email protected] or find him on LinkedIn. And if you want help mapping out your recruitment plan, book a call with me.

Keep on recruiting, and I'll see you out there. More from me on scaling partner outreach without adding headcount and finding affiliates that actually produce sales.

AI affiliate recruitment uses AI agents to find, evaluate, and contact potential affiliate partners for a brand. Tools like Alfie build a profile of your brand from your website, scan the affiliate landscape, and score each candidate for fit so you only reach out to partners worth your time.

About five minutes. You paste your URL and answer a few questions, and Alfie evaluates hundreds of potential affiliates and returns a scored list of targets.

An affiliate fit score rates how well a specific affiliate matches a specific brand. Alfie's fit score combines AI judgment, guided by detailed instructions from experienced affiliate managers, with metrics like whether the affiliate's traffic suits your brand's size.

No. A site with massive traffic can be a poor match for a niche brand. In one example, CNET scored around 90 for a tech gadget brand but only in the 60s for a pool supply brand. Fit beats size.

No. Alfie started with content websites but now evaluates profiles across the whole affiliate landscape, drawing on both the open web and a curated database of 120,000 affiliates.

50. Alfie used to show five matches at signup, but based on feedback from affiliate managers, new users now get 50 scored matches to start.

Advanced search lets you set up a recruitment campaign from a prompt and configure every element of the fit score, so you can tune exactly what a good match looks like for your brand. It's live in Alfie now.

Agency features are next on Alfie's roadmap, including multiple advertisers, multiple users and teams, and a reporting overview for managers.