How to Get Your Product Into Editorial Roundups

Most editorial roundups are monetized through affiliate links, so brands without an affiliate program often are not considered. To get your product into editorial roundups, join the networks publishers use, set a competitive commission, and pitch a specific product against a specific list. Those same pages are what AI engines cite when shoppers ask for recommendations.

It’s early September, which means holiday gift guide requests are starting to happen, and founders that don’t start positioning their brands now will miss out. However, a roundup or inclusion in holiday gift guides stopped being the kind of placement you win on merit alone, and most brands were never told what changed.

What an Editorial Roundup Actually Is Now

Open any “best vitamin C serums” or “best cotton pajamas” article and scroll to the top. There’s a line telling you the publisher may earn a commission on purchases made through its links. That line is the business model.

Here’s one of ours so you can see a good example. We landed a K-beauty haircare client in SheKnows for Amazon Prime Day, a piece built around their hair growth serum at its Prime Day price. The affiliate disclosure sits right at the top, and the body then does three jobs at once, explaining how the product works, using the review volume as proof, and pointing the reader to Amazon to buy it. That’s commerce content doing exactly what it’s designed to do, and it’s the shape of page most founders are picturing when they say they want press.

That piece also got picked up by Yahoo Shopping, which is the part founders tend to miss. One placement in a commerce property often becomes two or three, because these articles syndicate across partner networks in a way a straight feature rarely does.

Digiday has covered this shift for years, reporting how publishers fold affiliate links into the product roundups and reviews they were already planning, turning editorial into a revenue stream. Product reviews, roundups, listicles, and launch coverage all sit in the same bucket, written in an editorial voice and monetized on the click.

So when you pitch a roundup, you aren’t only asking an editor to like your product. You’re asking a business to include a product it can earn from.

Why Editors Ask About Your Affiliate Program First

Here’s what we’ve noticed across two decades of these relationships, and it’s the single most common reason a good product gets passed over. When a brand isn’t on an affiliate network, the pitch often doesn’t get a real read, because the outlet has no way to make the placement pay. Editors rarely say this outright. The pitch just goes quiet.

What we’ve also noticed is that affiliate-enabled products tend to get priority within a list. Two comparable serums, one commissionable and one not, and the commissionable one takes the slot. That isn’t editors abandoning judgment, it’s editors working inside a revenue target their publisher set for them.

What Commission Rate Actually Gets You Considered

Rates vary more than most founders expect. Digiday reported SHE Media putting retailer affiliate rates anywhere from 1% to 20% depending on category, with links dropped into editorial commerce content sitting at the low end of that band. Aggregated data across the largest networks puts the median ecommerce commission near 8.4% of order value.

In our experience, top-tier beauty and lifestyle publications won’t move below 10%, which tracks with the median sitting lower, because premium outlets command more than the market average. We negotiate commission on behalf of our clients to get a specific placement secured, and that number is often what decides whether a brand makes the list.

You aren’t only asking an editor to like your product. You’re asking a business to include a product it can earn from.

Why Roundup Slots Are Getting Harder to Win

The competition for these placements is intensifying, and the reason has nothing to do with your product.

Digiday’s 2026 research found publishers pulling back sharply on affiliate commerce as a growth area, with its weighted average falling from 2.42 in 2025 to 1.28 in 2026, which put it second-to-last among revenue streams publishers intend to build over the following six months. Events overtook it. Zero-click search is the cause, with publishers reporting referral traffic declines as AI answers absorb the clicks that used to land on their pages.

The scale of that hit is startling at the top of the market. EMARKETER, citing GSQi analysis, reported that Wirecutter’s visibility in Google search results dropped by more than 60% between May and August 2025. Wirecutter is one of the most-read product recommendation properties in the world.

Fewer publishers building commerce teams means fewer lists, and the lists that survive carry more weight per slot. Which is the opposite of a reason to give up on them.

The Part Nobody Tells Founders: The Roundup Pays Twice

This is the argument I make on every discovery call now, and it’s the reason roundup placement is worth more in 2026 than it was in 2023.

Affiliate content has become one of the primary inputs AI models draw on. EMARKETER reported that almost 70% of the sites cited in ChatGPT’s mentions of the eyewear brand Zenni came from affiliate marketing content, not from Zenni’s own website or product pages. The reviews, roundups, and comparison articles publishers wrote in order to earn commission are what the model repeated back. EMARKETER’s own framing is direct, calling affiliate content a key component of generative engine optimization for brands.

It goes deeper than citations. More than a quarter of OpenAI’s content partnerships since 2021 have been with publishers running scaled affiliate commerce operations, according to OriginalityAI data in the same report. The commerce publishers aren’t just being cited, they’re being licensed.

Format data points the same way. Wix Studio’s AI Search Lab analyzed 75,000 AI answers and over a million citations, and as Search Engine Land reported, listicles took 21.9% of all citations and roughly 40% of commercial-intent citations, more than any other page type.

Read those findings together. The ranked roundup is simultaneously the page that pays a commission today and the page an AI engine quotes when a shopper asks what to buy. One placement, two returns, and the second one compounds long after the traffic spike fades. That’s a very different calculation than a straight click.

Shopping behavior is moving that direction fast. EMARKETER reported that shopping has gained more share of ChatGPT mobile queries than any other category tracked, ahead of media and entertainment.

Which Roundups to Chase, and What Each One Costs You

Not every list deserves the same effort. Here’s how we sort them.

Roundup type	What it takes to get in	What you get back	Worth chasing when
Seasonal gift guide	Affiliate program live, hero product, pitch 3 to 4 months out	Traffic spike, strong AI citation value	You have a giftable price point and stock
Evergreen “best of” list	Competitive commission, review samples, proof of claims	Compounding citations, steady clicks	The query matches your product line
Head-to-head comparison	Specs, testing data, a named competitor	Highest AI citation weight	You genuinely win on one attribute
Editor’s pick, single product	Relationship and timing more than commission	Credibility, quotable in other coverage	You are launching something new
Retailer-hosted list	Retail relationship, clean product data	Conversion close to the cart	You already sell there
Creator roundup video	Commission plus seeding	Demonstrated use, long tail	The product shows well on camera

The middle two rows are where most brands underinvest. Evergreen lists and comparisons are less exciting than a holiday guide and they keep earning for years.

Creator and Affiliate Together Beat Either One Alone

Running creator partnerships and affiliate as separate line items leaves money on the table, and there’s now data putting a number on the gap.

impact.com, a partnership and affiliate platform, found that brands combining influencer and affiliate programs generated 46% higher affiliate-based sales than brands working with affiliate partners alone. In the same research, that lift reaches as high as 178% for the health and beauty sector specifically, which is worth sitting with if you sell skincare, haircare, or color.

The channel underneath all of this is bigger than most founders assume. EMARKETER forecasts US advertisers spending $13.81 billion on affiliate marketing in 2026, up 11.3% from 2025, generating roughly $241 billion in US ecommerce sales. For comparison, US retail ecommerce overall is forecast to grow 6.7% in the same period. Affiliate is growing at nearly double the rate of the thing it sits inside. Research from Awin and Digiday found 80% of brands and agencies treat affiliate as an important revenue source, with 46% expecting that importance to grow.

None of which shows up in a coverage report that counts impressions.

How Push The Envelope Secures Roundup Placements

Our product placement work is built around this specific problem, and it runs in four parts.

We get the affiliate infrastructure right before we pitch. Network membership, clean product feeds, accurate pricing, working links. A pitch that lands while the program is half-built wastes the one opening you had with that editor.

We negotiate the commission. This is the piece most brands don’t know is negotiable. When a dream publication needs a higher rate to justify the slot, we handle that conversation and structure it so the rate applies to that placement rather than resetting your whole program.

We pitch a specific product against a specific list. Not a brand overview. The product that wins the query the roundup is built around, with the testing, ingredients, or claims an editor needs to include it.

We track what the placement earns after the click. Commission, yes, and also whether the page starts turning up as a source when AI engines answer questions in your category.

Push The Envelope has been doing this since 2006, and across our verified January 2025 to May 2026 client data, affiliate-driven revenue rose 62%. We hold a 97% client retention rate, and I think that’s because clients can see the line from a placement to a sale rather than taking it on faith. That’s the same argument I made in modern PR isn’t just press.

If Amazon is where the revenue lands, how PR drives sales for Amazon brands covers how a roundup placement converts once a shopper reaches the listing.

Four Things to Fix Before Your Next Pitch

In this order, because each one gates the next.

Get on a network this week. Publishers work through the platforms they already have integrated, so pick where your category’s outlets actually are rather than the cheapest option. Until you’re on one, most commerce editors have no mechanism to include you.

Set a rate that clears the median, then leave room. With the market median near 8.4%, a rate below that quietly removes you from consideration at the outlets you most want. Build a tiered structure so you can go higher for a specific publication without repricing everything.

Fix your product page before the traffic arrives. Ingredients, use cases, testing, sizing, and certifications need to be in plain text, not locked inside images. This matters twice, once for the shopper who clicks and once for the AI engine reading the page later.

Pitch the query, not the brand. Find the exact lists that already rank and get cited for your category, then pitch the one product that would legitimately belong on each. A specific product against a specific list beats a brand overview every time.

Start with the network. Nothing else works until that’s live.

One honest disclosure before you go do that. Being on an affiliate network isn’t a silver bullet. Prospective clients say this to us constantly, that they joined a network months ago and almost nothing came of it, and they’re right to question if affiliate is really impactful.

The thing is, the network only makes you eligible. Editors aren’t browsing network listings looking for brands to feature, they’re working against deadlines off a shortlist of people who already brought them something useful. What actually moves the needle is the proactive outreach, the relationships that put your product in front of the right editor at the right moment with an angle that fits the list they’re already building. That’s the part we do, and it’s why eligibility and placement are two different problems.

Ready to Get Into the Lists That Matter in Your Category?

We’ll map the roundups and buying guides already shaping recommendations for your products, tell you which ones you’re eligible for today and which need work first, and handle the commission conversation to get the placement secured.

Talk to us about roundup placement →

For the wider picture on where these pages sit in the buying journey, how consumers discover beauty brands covers the full path.

Frequently Asked Questions