How I verify affiliate CTAs are actually rendering in production

Short summary

The author manages three AI-curated directory sites (models, indie games, open-source tools) that conditionally display affiliate CTAs based on Cloudflare Pages environment variables. After twice missing deployments that silently broke these revenue streams, they automated verification using a script that fetches sitemaps, samples detail pages, checks for human-readable strings indicating CTAs are rendered, and reports results in under two seconds. This catches deployment configuration gaps that eyeballing would miss.

• •Author wrote a verification script to catch missing affiliate CTAs after deployments
• •Script uses sitemaps to find sample pages and checks for human-readable string indicators
• •Catches silent configuration failures faster and more reliably than manual spot-checking

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.