How cloaking and redirects work
Updated May 2026
Link cloaking and redirect chains are the techniques that make affiliate ad activity hard to see. They are also completely normal parts of affiliate tracking, which is exactly why they are easy to abuse.
What link cloaking is
Link cloaking means hiding the real destination of a link behind another URL. Instead of exposing a long tracking URL full of affiliate parameters, the affiliate uses a short, clean looking link, often on their own domain or a link shortener, which forwards the user to the real tracking URL.
Affiliates use it for legitimate reasons: shorter links, tidier ads, and the ability to change the destination without changing the link. In the context of brand bidding it also has a second effect. The ad shows a clean display URL, so nothing about the link reveals that an affiliate is involved or that the click will be routed through a tracking system first.
What redirect chains are
A redirect chain is the series of URLs a user passes through before reaching the final destination. When a user clicks an affiliate ad, they might pass through four or five different URLs in a fraction of a second before landing on the brand's website.
Each step in the chain can drop a cookie, capture data, or pass attribution parameters. To a casual observer checking where the ad leads, it appears to go directly to the brand's official site. The affiliate activity sits in the middle of the chain and is invisible unless you follow every step.
Why this makes manual checking unreliable
A cloaked link tells you nothing by looking at it, and the redirect chain resolves too quickly for a person to see. On top of that, ads are not shown to everyone equally. Which ad a user sees depends on their country, device, time of day and search context, so an ad that is live for real users may not appear when you search yourself.
How adment sees through it
adment runs searches continuously from a wide range of locations and devices, reproducing the conditions of real users rather than checking from one place at one time.
When adment detects an ad, it follows the complete redirect chain step by step, unwraps any cloaked links, records every URL in the sequence, reads the affiliate parameters at the final destination, and stores screenshots of the ad as it appeared. The result is a full record of where the click actually went, which is difficult to dispute.