How often do affiliate product feeds actually update?

Part of: For creators

The median product row in a US affiliate feed was last updated 67 days ago. Only 20.2% were touched within the past week, and 6.8% are more than a year old. The oldest row in our pull has not been updated in 1,979 days — five and a half years.

Measured across 8,072 unique product rows from 95 US advertisers on 1 September 2026.

This matters for one reason. If you quote a price from a feed, you are quoting the price as of the row’s lastUpdated timestamp, not as of today — and half the time that is more than two months ago.

The distribution

Row last updated	Share of 8,072 rows
Within 1 day	11.4%
Within 7 days	20.2%
Within 30 days	33.0%
More than 90 days ago	19.6%
More than 180 days ago	9.4%
More than 365 days ago	6.8%

Two thirds of the catalogue is more than a month stale. That is the headline, and it is not a network failure — it is what happens when 95 advertisers each decide their own refresh cadence and nobody enforces one.

It varies enormously by advertiser

Advertiser	Rows	Median row age
Temu	57	under a day
UnbeatableSale.com	121	0 days
Hot Topic	54	2 days
Macy’s	60	2 days
Daily Drape	136	10 days
Wayfair	1,026	19 days
FYE	183	38 days
Zoro	318	61 days
Poshmark	4,200	67 days
antonline	168	93 days
Gruv	597	129 days
Woot!	223	151 days
Full Compass Systems	105	155 days
Madewell US	67	159 days
Bollman Hat Co.	60	571 days
Madewell Australia	58	861 days
Beach Trading Co.	42	1,107 days

Read the two ends against each other. A price quoted from Macy’s is two days old. A price quoted from Beach Trading Co. is, at the median, three years old. Both arrive in the same feed, through the same API, looking equally authoritative.

Woot! at 151 days is the one that should worry a deals creator most, because Woot is a flash-sale retailer: its entire proposition is that the price changes. A five-month-old row from a flash-sale shop is not a price, it is a memory.

Dune 3D Blu-ray and Blu-ray combination edition cover art, a retail product listing — A $30.99 listing from an advertiser whose rows median 129 days old. The disc is real; the price is four months old.

Jensen personal cassette player and recorder in black with a telescopic aerial — A $34.99 listing from an advertiser at 61 days. Two months is the good end of this market.

What to do about it

Date every price you publish. "Priced 1 September 2026" costs you nothing and converts a liability into a fact. We put it on every page.
Check the timestamp, not just the price. The feed exposes lastUpdated per row. If you are automating anything, filter on it.
Treat flash-sale advertisers as unquotable. Link them, do not price them.
Re-verify before Black Friday. A page built in September on 67-day-old data is quoting June by the time the traffic arrives in November. Refreshing it is also a legitimate freshness signal, which is the rare case where the honest thing and the SEO thing are the same thing.

Honest empty: lastUpdated tells you when the advertiser last submitted the row, not when the price last changed. A row updated today may carry an unchanged price; a stale row may be stale because nothing changed. It is a ceiling on accuracy, not a measurement of it.

Frequently asked

How often do affiliate product feeds update?

The median product row in a US affiliate feed was last updated 67 days before it was read. Across 8,072 unique rows from 95 US advertisers on 1 September 2026, 20.2% were updated within a week and 33.0% within a month.

How old can affiliate feed data be?

Very old. 6.8% of rows in our pull were more than a year stale, and the oldest had not been updated in 1,979 days, which is five and a half years. One electronics advertiser's rows had a median age of 1,107 days.

Is it safe to quote prices from an affiliate feed?

Only if you date them. A feed price is accurate as of the row's lastUpdated timestamp, which is more than two months old for half the catalogue. Publish the date alongside the price.

Which advertisers have the freshest feeds?

In our pull, UnbeatableSale.com and Temu at under a day, Hot Topic and Macy's at 2 days, Daily Drape at 10 and Wayfair at 19. The slowest were Beach Trading Co. at 1,107 days and Madewell Australia at 861.

Disclosure, in full: LinkToLooks has earned $0 in affiliate commission to date. No network has approved us. Everything below is measured from public product-feed data, not from our own payouts, and we will say so on every page that touches money until that changes.

Last verified 1 September 2026 across 8,072 unique product rows from 95 US advertisers, every one carrying a lastUpdated timestamp. Ages are whole days from that timestamp to 1 September 2026.