Inside Wirecutter’s push to diversify beyond affiliate revenue as AI reshapes discovery

“Wirecutter has been on a pretty intense path of diversification. We have been focusing on diversifying our journalism, our audience model and our revenue model,” said Cliff Levy, deputy publisher of Wirecutter.

The Hall of Fame Awards, a new franchise launched on Oct. 1, reflects that mission, Levy said. It highlights 50 products Wirecutter still recommends, six or more consecutive years later. Hall of Fame counts multiple sponsors, including financial services and CPG brands.

When the Hall of Fame Awards launched, it was one of the most popular pieces of journalism on the Times’ site, Levy said, and was one of the most successful stories in Wirecutter’s history. Hall of Fame and related coverage drew more than 3 million page views, according to a New York Times spokesperson. To boot, Wirecutter’s Hall of Fame Instagram post was the most successful social post in its history.

This comes after the success of the “Best New Picks” franchise, which launched in March, said Danielle Betras, Wirecutter’s head of revenue. Best New Picks has drawn more than 2 million page views, according to the spokesperson.

AI search has disrupted the economics of product recommendation sites. That growing reality has made it increasingly difficult for Wirecutter and others to depend on readers discovering its reviews through Google, and clicking through to links to make purchases from different retailers, which give Wirecutter commissions. 

Last year, Business Insider shuttered its commerce business due to its reliance on search. Google’s algorithm change at the end of 2024 decimated publishers’ product review sites, and led to the shutdown of USA Today Co.’s Reviewed and AP’s Buyline.

A Semrush report published this summer found a 71% increase in the appearance of Google’s AI summaries, AI Overviews, for commercial-intent queries between November 2025 and April 2026. A September 2026 study from Advanced Web Ranking found that for commercial-intent Google searches, the click-through rate was 11.91% overall, versus 3.51% with AI Overviews.

As the search environment has changed, Levy said Wirecutter has to “do more” to drive its business and audience. 

“Wirecutter, like a lot of product recommendation sites, had long been oriented around organic search traffic,” he explained. “All these product recommendation sites sprung up from organic search. So much of Wirecutter’s journalism and audience and revenue models were really structured around organic search. That has obviously changed for us in recent years as we focused on diversification.” 

Wirecutter isn’t replacing its core product recommendations for things like the best frying pan or the best iron, Levy noted. Instead, it’s producing more around those recommendations — such as franchises, podcasts and YouTube videos. For example, Wirecutter launched two shows earlier this year, Wirecutter Taste Test and Wirecutter Recommends.

While organic search is still key to Wirecutter’s business, increasingly the publisher is offering advertisers what Betras calls “hybrid deals,” or campaigns that span digital advertising, licensing, brand partnerships and affiliate. Hybrid deals have grown more than 300% year over year, according to a Times spokesperson.

All of these businesses are growing, Betras said. Wirecutter’s advertising business is only three years old, so that’s growing faster from a smaller base, she noted. Betras declined to give specific growth stats. Wirecutter drove more than $1 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) in the last year, Levy said.

“We were a predominantly affiliate business for much of Wirecutter’s history, and so we didn’t necessarily have that toolkit available to us,” Betras said. “We had almost maxed out in some ways with partners, and so the ability to work with us from an advertising perspective, for example, was really net positive.”

At a time when marketing budgets are getting pinched, conversions are the top priority for many advertisers, said Danny Weisman, co-founder at media planning and buying agency Obsessed Media. Multi-component deals like the ones Wirecutter is offering allows publishers to increase ad revenue by bringing together traditional display advertising and affiliate commerce offerings into more comprehensive packages focused on driving conversions, according to Weisman.

Bundling these offerings can command higher prices and improve margins, particularly for publishers like Wirecutter with strong brand recognition and intellectual property, he said. As AI search threatens publishers’ referral traffic, this approach could also help publishers diversify revenue and monetize more of their content, he added.

Betras and Levy pushed back on any characterization of the editorial franchises as repackaging previous reviews. It’s a way to “eventize” Wirecutter’s top recommendations, “for our audiences to find outside of that moment of transaction,” and wrap advertising around those, Betras explained. Wirecutter can then promote the franchises through newsletters, social platforms and other channels.

Another way to insulate itself from AI search changes is leaning into the humans behind the reviews, Levy said. There are now over 175 Wirecutter journalists, according to Levy, up from 115 in 2022. 

The fourth quarter is “the most important time of the year for Wirecutter,” said Levy, and a time when the publisher leans into gift recommendations.

“Gifting is also a reflection of how we are increasingly focusing on differentiation from LLMs. We are focusing on how we can really get across to our audience the humanity of Wirecutter, our journalism, and our journalists — real people who are steeped in a tremendous amount of expertise, experience and rigor,” Levy said. “That is going to be a huge priority for us in the coming months, in coming years — emphasizing that differentiation between the human journalists at Wirecutter, who are doing incredible work, and the LLMs.”