The Affiliate Stack Playbook

Turn your tool list into a page that pays.

Everybody in AI has a stack. Most of them keep it in a tweet. I turned mine into a lead magnet with a referral link on every tool that pays, published it on my own domain, and got it in front of Google. Seven steps, one Claude Code session. Here is every step, every prompt, and everything that broke.

Model What Works Audit Who Pays Your Links Everywhere Your Domain Share Cards Search Console

Download The PDF → Free. No email needed.

32

Tools checked for a real affiliate program

13

Actually pay cash. The rest pay credits or nothing

40%

Lifetime recurring. The top two programs

Prepared By

Ian Ryan Kirk

Captain AI · Founder

The Finished Page

ianryankirk.com/ai-stack

Live. Go click around

Status

Day One

Indexing started. No results claimed yet

The Seven Steps

One page. Seven moves. All from Claude Code.

You never open a config file. Every step below is a prompt you paste. Claude Code does the work, and you make the calls only you can make: which links, which brand, when it ships.

Step 01

Model a page that already works

Find a tool-stack page in your niche that people already share. Take the structure, not the words. Sections, card types, where the CTAs sit.

Step 02

Audit which tools actually pay

Most of a stack pays nothing. Find the ones that pay cash, how much, and for how long, before you sign up for anything.

Step 03

Put your links on every card that pays

Sign up, swap links in, keep a plain link on everything else. Add one honest disclosure line. Click-test every link.

Step 04

Make it look real

Real company logos on every card. A list with logos reads like a reference. A list without them reads like a blog post.

Step 05

Publish on your own slug

Your domain, your slug, a PDF next to it. Now it's an asset you own, not a post that scrolls away.

Step 06

Make it shareable

A custom share card so the link looks like something when you drop it in a DM, a comment or a group. A favicon so the tab isn't blank.

Step 07

Tell Google it exists

Verify your domain in Search Console and submit your sitemap. This is the step everyone skips and the one that broke the most.

01 · Model It · 02 · Audit It

Most of your stack pays you nothing.

Paste into Claude Code · Step 01

Read [URL]. List every section, card type and call to action in order. Give me the structure only. Do not copy any of the copy.

Paste into Claude Code · Step 02

Research whether each of these tools has a paid affiliate program: [LIST]. Official pages only. Give me a table: tool, payout, signup URL, network, gotchas. Group it into pays cash, pays credits, pays nothing. Do not sign up for anything.

Program	What It Pays	Type
GoHighLevelTop	40% recurring for the life of the account	Cash
SkoolTop	40% of the monthly fee, for life	Cash
Apify · Tella	30% recurring. Apify caps it per customer, Tella doesn't	Cash
Higgsfield · ElevenLabs · HeyGen	20 to 25% for the first 12 months	Cash
Claude · Hetzner · Clay	Account credits only. Nice, but it isn't income	Credit
GitHub · Cloudflare · Obsidian	No program. Keep them on the page anyway, they earn trust	None

Read the terms, not the headline rate. One program's creator track only credits video content. Another gave me 5% through its customer referral link while its partner program pays 15%. The rate you get depends on which door you walk through.

03 · Link It · 04 · Dress It

Your link on every card that pays.

Paste into Claude Code · Step 03

Swap these affiliate links into the matching cards: [LINKS]. Keep the visible domain on each card. Update the disclosure line. List every tracked link at the end so I can click-test them.

Do

Swap a tool that pays nothing for one that pays, when it does the same job
Put a discount code in the card copy. It gives the reader a reason to use your link
Click every link once and check your dashboard shows the visit
Keep one plain disclosure line. Honest beats hidden

Don't

Paste a partner-recruiting link where a buyer link belongs
List tools you don't use because they pay well
Trust a vanity redirect until you've seen it land tracked
Hotlink logos from someone else's site

Paste into Claude Code · Step 04

Pull each tool's own icon from its domain, and the owner's GitHub avatar for each repo. Flag anything smaller than 64px and find a sharper source. Embed them so the page stays one self-contained file.

Why embed the logos

One file means the web page and the PDF both carry every logo, and nothing breaks when a vendor changes their favicon. 57 logos added about 300 KB. Six came back blurry on the first pass. The fix was the company's GitHub avatar or the site's own app icon.

05 · Publish It · 06 · Make It Shareable

Your domain. Your slug. Your asset.

Paste into Claude Code · Step 05

Publish this HTML at /[slug] on my site. Put the PDF next to it and add a download button that only shows on screen. Run the build and the tests, then push. Poll the live URL until it loads, and tell me when it does.

Paste into Claude Code · Step 06

Make a 1200x630 share card for /[slug] in my brand, with the headline and a few tool logos. Add canonical and social tags to the page. If my site has no favicon, make one from my logo.

60s

From push to live on the domain

16

Other lead magnets that got share cards too

7

Print pages, checked on every render

!

Check the thing you shipped, not the thing you pushed

One push never deployed. No error, no build, nothing. I only caught it because Claude polled the live page and the old title was still there. Always have it confirm the live URL, not the commit.

07 · Tell Google

The step everyone skips broke five times.

Paste into Claude Code · Step 07

Verify my domain in Google Search Console and submit my sitemap through the API. If a permission or an API is missing, stop and give me the exact fix. Don't open a browser unless I say so.

Broke 01

My Google command-line tool had no Search Console command

Fix: Claude called the Search Console API directly, using a token from the same Google login.

Broke 02

My login didn't have permission

Fix: one re-login with two extra permissions added, Search Console and Site Verification.

Broke 03

Both APIs were switched off

Fix: enable them in the Google Cloud project your login uses. The console often opens on a different project.

Broke 04

Switched on, still "disabled"

Fix: wait. It took a few minutes to register. One look at the console confirmed it was on.

Broke 05

My account had never verified the site

Fix: Google issued a verification file. Claude put it on the site, pushed, verified, added the property and submitted the sitemap.

Result: 33 pages submitted. Downloaded by Google within seconds. Zero errors, zero warnings, zero indexed yet. Indexing takes days. Leave the verification file on the site forever, or you lose ownership.

Your Turn

See it live. Then build yours.

The page this playbook describes is live. Open it, click the cards, look at the share card when you paste the link. Then build yours next to people doing the same thing.

The Finished Page

Open The AI Stack

36 tools, 19 GitHub repos and 8 skills, grouped by job, with logos on every card. Free, no email needed.

See The AI Stack → ianryankirk.com/ai-stack

Build It With People

Join AI Automation Insiders

The free Skool community for people building with Claude Code and n8n. Post your stack page and get it torn apart before Google sees it.

Join Free On Skool → skool.com/ai-automation-insiders

What I'll add when the numbers come in

Which pages Google indexed, what people searched to find them, and which affiliate links got clicked. Day one is setup. The results page comes later, with real numbers or not at all.

The Skool link on this page is a referral link. If you join through it, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.