Levanta, an affiliate and creator commerce platform, published research on June 30, 2026 showing that 74 percent of surveyed middle-tier creators sent affiliate traffic to more than one shopping destination in the prior 30 days, and that only 7.1 percent of creators said they would send shoppers to a destination simply because a brand asked them to.

Survey scope and methodology

Levanta surveyed 1,000 active middle-tier creators in the United States for the report, titled Creators Control Where the Traffic Goes. The company defined middle-tier creators as those with 10,000 to 500,000 followers or subscribers on their largest platform. Every respondent had posted an affiliate link or promo code within the previous 30 days and had earned money from affiliate links or brand collaborations within the previous 90 days. Levanta noted that percentages throughout the report may not sum to 100 due to rounding, and that multi-select questions could produce totals exceeding 100 because respondents were permitted to choose more than one answer.

The research separates two distinct questions that are often conflated in how brands track creator performance: where a creator says they would prefer to send shoppers, and where their affiliate links have actually gone in recent weeks. Those two figures, according to the report, diverge substantially.

Where creators publish

Before addressing destination routing, the report establishes where these creators actually produce content. Social media accounted for 83.2 percent of primary content channels among surveyed creators, while another 10.1 percent selected streaming platforms outside social media, such as YouTube, Twitch, or Kick. Independent blogs or websites captured 2.7 percent, newsletters or email 2.2 percent, and podcasts 1.7 percent.

Among the social-first creators, TikTok led with 30.0 percent, followed by Instagram at 28.7 percent and Facebook at 21.6 percent. A further 13.1 percent said they post equally across multiple social platforms. Levanta connected this platform concentration to findings from its earlier Affiliate After AI report, which found that shoppers showed a preference for short-form video content when learning about products from creators. Because middle-tier creators cluster on the same platforms where that discovery activity occurs, the report argues their routing decisions carry outsized weight for brands selling across several storefronts at once.

Multi-destination routing is now the norm

The report's central finding concerns how creators distributed shopper traffic over the prior month. Only 26.0 percent of surveyed creators said they sent shoppers to a single shopping destination exclusively. The remaining 74.0 percent reported some form of multi-destination behavior, though the intensity of that behavior varied. Among the full sample, 36.0 percent said they mostly used one destination but occasionally diversified into others; 14.1 percent said they regularly split traffic between two destinations; and 23.9 percent said they regularly and actively sent traffic to all three destination types tracked in the survey, Amazon, Walmart, and brand-owned websites.

Levanta framed this pattern as a structural mismatch with how many brands currently organize their creator programs. Ian Brodie, CEO of Levanta, addressed the disconnect directly. "Creators don't think in channel silos," Brodie said in the announcement. "Our research reinforces what we're seeing every day: creators value flexibility across multiple shopping destinations rather than loyalty to a single channel, which should shift the way brands operate when managing their creator programs."

The report described a specific operational risk that follows from this pattern. Because many brands still track affiliate performance separately by destination, using different dashboards, platforms, and reporting tools for Amazon, Walmart, and their own site, a creator who shifts activity from one program to another can appear to have gone quiet in the first program, even while remaining fully active through a different link or channel. Levanta's report described this as a case where "brands can mistake a shift in traffic routing for a drop in creator engagement," and it identified the underlying issue as one of visibility rather than creator disengagement.

Stated preference does not match actual behavior

When creators were asked where they would send shoppers if given a free choice, Amazon was the clear leader. Amazon captured 45.5 percent of first-choice preference, well ahead of the next closest answers. Another 16.3 percent said they would use all three destinations depending on the situation, 15.9 percent chose Walmart, 15.4 percent chose a brand-owned website, and 6.9 percent reported no strong preference either way.

Actual link activity over the prior 30 days told a more distributed story. Amazon accounted for 32.1 percent of the affiliate links creators reported sharing, brand-owned websites accounted for 26.9 percent, other marketplaces or websites not named in the survey categories accounted for 22.5 percent, and Walmart accounted for 18.5 percent.

The gap between the 45.5 percent who named Amazon as their preferred destination and the 32.1 percent share Amazon actually received in link activity is the report's clearest illustration of its central argument. Brodie elaborated on what drives that gap. "Many brands still operate with the mindset that traffic will flow wherever they direct it, but creators are deciding where shopper traffic goes based on what they believe will perform the best," Brodie said. "Commission is not the only lever brands have. Destination trust, link access, measurement, reliable payment, and the buying experience all shape whether a creator feels confident sending their audience to a given path. Understanding how these decisions are made is critical for brands looking to scale creator partnerships and drive growth across channels."

Levanta's report was careful to note what this gap does not mean. The distributed link activity does not indicate creators are abandoning Amazon; rather, the report states that "the strongest first-choice destination does not capture all creator activity," since a creator may default to one destination in principle while routing individual links according to earnings potential, product availability, ongoing offers, or audience context in practice.

What drives the routing decision

The report asked creators which three factors mattered most when selecting a shopping destination, using a multi-select format. Whether the creator trusted the destination ranked highest at 38.7 percent, narrowly ahead of how likely the creator judged their audience to actually complete a purchase there, at 38.2 percent. Where the audience generally preferred to shop ranked third at 35.5 percent, and whether the audience trusted the shopping destination ranked fourth at 35.0 percent.

Payment-related factors ranked lower but remained significant. Whether the creator got paid reliably and on time was selected by 33.1 percent, and how much the creator earned per click or per sale ranked just behind that, at 32.3 percent. How easy it was to obtain a working affiliate link registered at 31.2 percent, whether the brand matched the creator's personal values registered at 29.7 percent, and whether the creator could see how their links were performing registered at 26.3 percent, the lowest-ranked factor among those tested.

A separate, more specific question asked how creators would decide between destinations if an identical product were available across Amazon, Walmart, and a brand's own website simultaneously. Here, 36.4 percent said they would decide on a brand-by-brand basis according to which destination paid the best, the single largest response. Another 25.4 percent said they would send shoppers to wherever their audience seemed most likely to complete a purchase. A further 22.8 percent said they always use the same destination regardless of which brand is involved, while 8.3 percent said they share more than one link for the same product, and just 7.1 percent said they follow the brand's requested destination.

That final figure, 7.1 percent, represents the report's most direct measurement of how much control brands retain over destination choice once a creator has multiple viable options for the same product. Combined with the 36.4 percent who route based on payout and the 25.4 percent who route based on where their audience is most likely to buy, the data indicates that commission structure and purchase likelihood function as far stronger levers than direct requests from a brand.

Report's stated implications for brands

Levanta's conclusion frames the findings around infrastructure rather than persuasion. According to the report, brands need three things to respond effectively to this pattern: a clearer, cross-channel view of creator activity so that a dip in one program can be correctly identified as either genuine disengagement or a shift to another channel; stronger control over the specific levers that influence where traffic goes, since commission structure and purchase confidence appear to carry more weight than passive brand preference; and a sharper focus on making each individual shopping destination worth choosing, since creators are shown to weigh factors including destination trust, payment reliability, link access, and buying experience alongside commission rate.

The report states plainly that commission strategy remains central to influencing creator behavior, but that it does not operate in isolation. Destination trust, measurement visibility, and a smooth buying experience all appear as parallel factors shaping whether a creator directs traffic toward a given path, according to the findings.

The full report is available for download through Levanta's website. Levanta describes itself as a unified creator and affiliate platform for e-commerce brands, enabling revenue-driving partnership programs across Shopify, Amazon, and Walmart through what the company calls an AI-powered Creator Marketplace.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Levanta's findings arrive amid a broader industry pattern of platforms and partnership networks racing to build infrastructure around creator-driven commerce, a trend PPC Land has tracked closely. Partnership platform impact.comreported nearly $120 billion in partner-referred gross merchandise value during 2025 and projected annual recurring revenue exceeding $270 million, figures that reflect just how much commercial weight now sits inside creator and affiliate channels rather than traditional media buys. Against that backdrop, Levanta's finding that only 7.1 percent of creators follow a brand's requested destination becomes a more pointed data point: it quantifies a control gap that platforms serving thousands of brands are actively trying to close.

The report's warning about siloed measurement also lands at a moment when retail media networks are investing heavily in exactly the kind of cross-channel visibility Levanta says is missing from many creator programs. Walmart, one of the three destinations named throughout the survey, has been steadily building first-party measurement infrastructure elsewhere in its advertising business. Walmart Connect's Scintilla API opened retail and operational data to agency partners in April 2026 specifically to address, in the words of Walmart Data Ventures Vice President of Product Linda Lomelino, planning workflows in which "media teams and tech partners have been working with an incomplete picture." That same structural complaint, fragmented visibility across channels, is what Levanta's report identifies as the core challenge facing brands managing affiliate creators across Amazon, Walmart, and owned websites simultaneously.

TikTok Shop offers a further point of contrast. TikTok Shop tightened its creator enforcement rules in June 2026, introducing a continuous compliance model where policy violations can escalate toward payment freezes for creators running affiliate links through the platform. That kind of centralized, single-platform enforcement stands in contrast to the fragmented, creator-controlled routing that Levanta describes across Amazon, Walmart, and brand-owned websites, where no single platform holds comparable authority over where a creator ultimately sends a shopper.

The distributed nature of affiliate routing also intersects with earlier controversies around attribution integrity. When Rakuten Advertising, impact.com, and Awin each moved to suspend the Honey browser extension in January 2026, the underlying complaint was that Honey inserted itself as an artificial final touchpoint and diverted commissions away from the creators who had actually driven a sale. Impact.com's suspension of Honey centered on what the company described as standdown violations that concealed attribution manipulation from compliance testers. Levanta's report does not address browser extensions directly, but its emphasis on link access and measurement as factors creators weigh when choosing a destination speaks to the same underlying concern: creators need confidence that the destination they promote will accurately credit them for the traffic they generate.

For an industry that has spent the better part of 2025 and 2026 consolidating creator marketplaces, YouTube unified BrandConnect into a single Creator Partnerships platform in March 2026, and Meta announced its own consolidated Creator Marketing Hub at Cannes in June 2026, Levanta's data suggests that consolidation on the platform side has not yet solved the underlying visibility problem on the brand side. A creator can be fully active and generating value while appearing to have gone quiet inside any single program a brand happens to be watching.

Timeline

  • June 2025: Levanta previously published its Affiliate After AI report, cited in this research as evidence that shoppers favor short-form video content when learning about products from creators.
  • June 30, 2026, 08:00 ET: Levanta released Creators Control Where the Traffic Goes, based on a survey of 1,000 US creators with 10,000 to 500,000 followers or subscribers.
  • June 30, 2026: Ian Brodie, CEO of Levanta, commented publicly on the findings, stating that creator routing behavior should shift how brands manage creator programs.

Summary

Who: Levanta, an affiliate and creator commerce platform serving brands operating across Shopify, Amazon, and Walmart, surveyed 1,000 active middle-tier creators in the United States, defined as creators with 10,000 to 500,000 followers or subscribers on their largest platform.

What: The survey found that 74 percent of creators sent affiliate traffic to more than one shopping destination in the prior 30 days, that stated first-choice preference for Amazon (45.5 percent) exceeded Amazon's actual share of link activity (32.1 percent), and that only 7.1 percent of creators said they would route shoppers to a destination simply because a brand requested it.

When: Levanta published the report, titled Creators Control Where the Traffic Goes, on June 30, 2026.

Where: The survey covered creators based in the United States, examining routing behavior across Amazon, Walmart, brand-owned websites, and other commerce destinations.

Why: The findings highlight a structural gap between how many brands organize creator and affiliate programs, typically by shopping destination, using separate platforms, teams, and reporting, and how creators actually behave, routing traffic according to commission, trust, and purchase likelihood rather than platform loyalty or brand direction.