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Creator economy · Platform rules

Which YouTube surfaces can carry an affiliate link?

Two of the four linkable surfaces sit behind the Partner Programme, and they are the two a viewer can click without scrolling.

Some links here are affiliate links — if you buy, the retailer may pay us a commission at no extra cost to you. We have earned $0 from them so far. Here’s how it works.

Part of: For creators

The surface matrix

Every row below comes from a YouTube help page read on 3 September 2026. Where the page says nothing, this table says so rather than guessing.

The pattern is worth naming. YouTube gates the surfaces it renders inside the player and leaves the surfaces that are really just text — the description, the comment field — open to everyone. That is a coherent policy, and it has an awkward consequence for a creator building an audience: the placements that are easiest for a viewer to act on are the ones you get last.

What the Partner Programme gate actually costs

Read the two quoted sentences together and the shape of the restriction is clear. It is not that a small channel cannot post affiliate links. It is that a small channel can only post them below the video, in text a viewer has to go looking for.

• The description works everywhere, but on mobile it is collapsed by default, and the first line or two is what most viewers ever see. Where the link sits in the description is a real decision, and we have written it up separately.
• The pinned comment works everywhere and has one genuine advantage over the description: you can edit it after publishing without touching the video's metadata.
• Cards and end-screen links do not work until the Partner Programme accepts you. Any advice that opens with ‘add a card’ is written for a channel that is already past that point.

End screens have mechanical limits too

Even inside the Partner Programme, the end screen is a narrower instrument than it looks. YouTube's own constraints, quoted:

• ‘Your video has to be at least 25 seconds long to have an end screen.’
• ‘End screens can be added to the last 5–20 seconds of a video.’
• ‘You can add up to four elements to your end screen for videos with standard 16:9 aspect ratio. Other aspect ratios may have a lower limit.’
• The five element types are Video, Playlist, Subscribe, Channel and Link.
• ‘End screens aren't available for videos set as made for kids, in the YouTube music app, flash videos, mobile web, or 360 videos.’

Three of those matter commercially. The 25-second minimum rules out a large share of short vertical video outright. The four-element cap means every link you add competes with Subscribe and with your next video for the same four slots. And ‘made for kids’ removes end screens entirely, which is a hard constraint for anyone publishing toy, craft or family content and setting the audience flag honestly.

Disclosure is a separate obligation

None of the above is about disclosure, and the two get run together constantly. YouTube's paid-promotion page is explicit that the platform's checkbox does not discharge a legal duty: creators and brands are, in its words, ‘responsible for understanding and fully following legal obligations to disclose paid promotion in their content according to their jurisdiction’.

What the checkbox does do is documented: ‘We automatically show viewers a disclosure message for 10 seconds at the beginning of the video.’ Ten seconds at the start of a twelve-minute review is not the same thing as a disclosure a viewer sees when they reach the link, which is the point our disclosure guide argues at length.

The same page also constrains branded visuals: title cards are ‘5 seconds or less and static’ when used at the start, and end cards must sit ‘within the last 30 seconds of the video and must be static’.

A working order of operations

1. Put the link in the description, high. It is the only surface that works on every channel, in every player, from day one.
2. Pin a comment with the same link. Editable later; useful when a product sells out and the description is buried in a template.
3. Say it out loud in the video. No platform gates speech, and it is the only placement that reaches a viewer watching on a television.
4. Add cards and end-screen links when the Partner Programme lets you, and treat them as an upgrade rather than a plan.
5. Disclose independently of the checkbox. Tick it, and also write the disclosure where the reader meets the link.

What we could not verify

• Whether pinned comments carry any link restriction we did not find. The pages we read do not mention one. Absence of a documented rule is not proof there is none, and we are not going to present it as one.
• Current Partner Programme thresholds. They have changed repeatedly and are outside what we checked on this date. Take them from YouTube directly rather than from any article, including this one.
• Anything about click-through. We have no click data for any YouTube surface, and neither does any blog quoting a figure for one. Nobody publishing ‘description links convert at X%’ has sourced it.
• How this behaves on connected TVs. The end-screen exclusions list names mobile web, the music app and 360 video; it does not settle television playback, so we are not describing it.

Frequently asked

Can you put affiliate links on YouTube?

Yes, in the video description and in comments, on any channel. Info cards and end-screen links to external sites require YouTube Partner Programme membership.

Do I need to be monetised to post affiliate links?

Not for description links. You do need Partner Programme membership for the two in-player link surfaces, which is a different question from whether ads run on your videos.

Does the paid promotion checkbox count as my disclosure?

YouTube says creators remain responsible for their own legal obligations. The checkbox triggers a 10-second message at the start of the video; treat it as a platform feature, not a compliance step.

Can a Short have an end screen?

A video under 25 seconds cannot have one, by YouTube's stated minimum. Longer Shorts are a separate question we look at in the Shorts comparison.

How many links should a description carry?

That is a caption-design question rather than a policy one. Our page on link counts argues it from truncation points rather than from click data nobody has.

Sources

• Add end screens to videos — YouTube Help. Read 3 September 2026 for the 25-second minimum, the 5–20 second window, the four-element cap, the element list and the exclusions.
• YouTube Help: linking an info card to an external website. Read 3 September 2026 for the info-card Partner Programme condition.
• Add paid product placements, sponsorships and endorsements — YouTube Help. Read 3 September 2026 for the checkbox, the 10-second automatic message, the title-card and end-card constraints and the jurisdiction sentence.
• Quotations are YouTube's wording, reproduced only as far as needed to state the rule accurately.

Last verified 3 September 2026 against three YouTube Help pages read during this run: end screens, external link cards and paid product placements

How this guide was made. We research and draft these guides with AI, then a person checks every price, link and factual claim against the source before it publishes. We work this way because it lets us re-verify prices across hundreds of guides in a day, which is what keeps the numbers here current; it does not decide what we recommend. Anything we could not verify is labelled as unverified rather than filled in.