The link worked.
The tracking didn’t.

A tip jar with a hole in the bottom looks exactly like a tip jar nobody tips.
Affiliate links fail the same way.
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The link opens. The page loads. The reader buys. The dashboard shows the click, so everything looks fine — except the money that should follow it quietly falls out somewhere between the click and the checkout.

Somewhere in the chain, a redirect forgets to carry the tag. An app-store hop drops a parameter on the way through. Safari, for one, clears cookies set by a script after seven days without the reader touching the site again — so someone who clicks on Monday and buys the following week can simply vanish from the record.

The cruel part: a broken link doesn't look like a broken link. It looks like a bad month.

So you do the sensible thing, and it's the wrong thing. You rewrite the hook. You try a new thumbnail. You start wondering whether your audience has gone off you — while the link has been paying nobody since Tuesday.

The problem only shows up in the gap between your click count and your payout. And checking that gap by hand works beautifully — on the days you remember to check.

That gap is what we're building for at Linkify.ai: short links made to carry the tag all the way through, and a clearer view of the path from recommendation to credited sale.

Have you ever found a hole in your jar? How long had it been there before you noticed?