This is a guest post by Anish Lal. Anish has been active in the trading industry for over a decade and is Chief Business Development Officer at BlackBull, a New Zealand-based brokerage business

For years, the broker industry ran on a simple acquisition formula for media related deals: review sites ranked you, affiliates sent you traffic, and you paid CPA when a client funded. It could get messy, expensive, and occasionally theatrical, but systems like CellExpert, which is widely used, helped to track RoI and the job of a partnership officer (or affiliate manager) is to monitor this.

That model is now being rewritten, and not by another marketing platform. It is being rewritten by AI.

Traders used to start with Google, bounce through a handful of comparison pages, scan Trustpilot, then maybe click an affiliate link. Today a growing number of them just ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity: who should I trade with?

Those engines have been trained on decades of industry content, review sites, forums, regulator notices, Trustpilot scores, YouTube rants, forum comments from years ago…and more. The first shortlist a trader sees is no longer a paid placement. It is a synthesis. We are already seeing the commercial consequences. 

At BlackBull we have recorded around a 30% increase in leads from ChatGPT and other AI search tags, with the lift most visible in APAC and the EU. That is not a vanity channel. It is showing up in the CRM with UTM source chatgpt.com and similar AI tags attached.

Review sites are changing the deal

The review sites know this. Many are moving away from pure CPA and asking for fixed monthly placement fees instead. From their side, the logic is obvious: if they cannot reliably control the click, they would rather lock in a retainer than wait for a conversion that may now happen inside an AI answer box. Those fees are also becoming more competitive. As AI engines get better at weighing regulation, execution reputation and review quality, the value of a generic “top 10 brokers” page declines. A site without real readership or loyalty will struggle to justify the old performance model. The legacy brands with traffic, trust and a recognisable name can still command a higher placement fee. Everyone else is negotiating from a weaker position.

That does not mean review sites disappear. It means the middle of the market gets thinner. If you do not have readership or loyalty, you lose direct traffic and clicks. AI has already eaten a slice of the discovery journey those sites used to own. Affiliates, IBs and the squeeze. 

Brokers have tried to route around this by pushing affiliate relationships into the IB space, which revolves around turning introducers into longer-term revenue partners rather than one-off CPA deals. That can work. An IB with a real book and a real relationship is harder for an AI chatbot to replace than a review page with a cookie. But it is not a complete answer. IBs still compete with the same AI-shaped first impression. If the model has already told a trader three brokers it considers reliable, the introducer is arriving later in the funnel.

CPA is not dead. It is just no longer the default. Performance deals will survive where the partner can prove incremental value for unique audiences, high-intent communities, or conversion that AI cannot replicate. Fixed placements will survive where the brand still moves the needle. Everything in between is under pressure.

What this means for traders (and us)

For traders, this is mostly good news. More of the decision is being informed by accumulated public records rather than whoever paid the most that month. The catch, of course, is that AI is only as good as the content it was fed. Garbage in still produces a confident-sounding shortlist. 

For brokers, the implication is uncomfortable and useful at the same time. 

You cannot buy your way to the top of an AI answer the way you once bought a review-site slot. Reputation, regulation, reviews and years of content now compound in a new distribution layer. The firms that treated Trustpilot, service quality and public track record as afterthoughts will feel that first. 

We are not predicting the end of affiliates. We are saying the old CPA-only stack is losing its monopoly on discovery. AI did not invent broker selection. It just compressed twenty years of industry content into a single conversation and a growing number of traders in APAC and Europe are starting there.

This being said, I write this on my lunch break reviewing our quarter spend on brand partners and the costs have increased. However, so has RoI.