Verticals

A vertical is the product or service category an affiliate offer belongs to — nutra, leadgen, dating, crypto, e-commerce, gambling, search arbitrage, content arbitrage, and a catch-all "other" bucket. Most operators specialise in one or two verticals because the angles, the compliance bar, and the conversion shape differ sharply across them.

Classification is rules-based on landing-page content, headline patterns, and known offer hosts, with an LLM fallback for ambiguous cases that collapses unrecognised labels into the closest taxonomy class. Verticals that cannot be classified with confidence are left in the "other" bucket rather than guessed.

The taxonomy collapses several adjacent categories — auto, real estate, finance, education — into a single leadgen vertical because the underlying media-buying playbook is similar: paid form-fill at a fixed CPL with state-level compliance constraints. Splitting them back out is a future enhancement once the corpus is deep enough to support per-sub-vertical pages.

Each vertical page is built from the same spy corpus that powers the homepage feed. The top advertisers, the network split, and the country presence are computed at request time from the indexed creatives — not from a one-off snapshot or a competitor's report.