What is a bridge page? The technique everyone recommends, and the two rules against it

A bridge page is an intermediate page between an advertisement and the offer it advertises. The visitor clicks the ad, lands on your page rather than the merchant’s, reads an advertorial or a review or takes a quiz, and only then continues to the thing being sold. It is also called a prelander or a pre-sell page, and it is one of the most widely recommended techniques in affiliate marketing.

It is also named, in as many words, as a policy violation by Google Ads — and for anyone sending that traffic to Amazon, the arrangement stopped paying on 14 April 2026. Both of those are quotable from the platforms themselves, and neither appears in the guides that teach the technique.

This is not an argument that intermediate pages are wrong. It is an argument that four words in Google’s policy do all the work, and that most people building bridge pages have not read them.

What a bridge page is, and what it was for

The mechanism is old and the reasoning is sound. Cold traffic converts badly: somebody who clicks an ad and lands directly on a sales page has been given no reason to trust anything on it. A page in between can warm them up — explain the problem before naming the product, answer the obvious objection, show the thing in use, filter out the people who were never going to buy.

There was a second, more practical reason, and it is the one that actually drove adoption: advertising networks have long disliked ads that point straight at an affiliate link. A bridge page gave the ad a destination that belonged to the advertiser. The affiliate link moved one step further down, out of the ad system’s view.

That is the honest history of the technique: half conversion craft, half a way around a rule. Which matters, because the rule caught up.

Google Ads names them, by name

Under insufficient original content, Google’s advertising policies give as an example of what is disallowed:

Bridge pages, doorways, gateways, or other intermediate pages that are only used to link to other sites

Read that twice, because the last seven words are the entire policy. Google is not banning pages that sit between an ad and a merchant. It is describing pages whose only function is to pass the visitor along — no original content, nothing the visitor could have wanted for its own sake, an anteroom with a door on the far wall.

The same policy elsewhere rules out destinations “designed for the primary purpose of showing ads” and content “replicated from another source without adding value in the form of original content or additional functionality”. It is one idea stated three ways: the page has to be worth arriving at.

One mercy worth knowing if you are already running these: Google says violations of this policy do not trigger immediate suspension, and that a warning is issued at least seven days beforehand.

For Amazon, the arrangement stopped paying in April 2026

Amazon’s rules have two layers here, and the second one is recent enough that most of what is published on bridge pages predates it.

The long-standing rule. The Participation Requirements permit paid search, with a condition:

You may purchase paid search advertisements […] so long as you comply with the Operating Agreement and those paid or unpaid search results send users to your site and not directly or indirectly, via a Redirecting Link, to the Amazon Site.

Note the shape of that sentence. It anticipates the indirect case explicitly, and what it forbids there is a Redirecting Link — a hop that exists to move the visitor on. A page with genuine substance that a reader might click through from is a different animal from a redirect wearing a page as a costume. The distinction is the same one Amazon draws about link cloaking generally.

The new rule, and it is blunter. Effective 14 April 2026, Amazon expanded the list of purchases that do not count. Disqualified purchases now include products bought by customers referred through

any paid or boosted advertisement linking to Amazon, regardless of whether prohibited keywords are used

Previously the disqualification hung on which keywords you bid on — Amazon’s trademarks and their misspellings. That qualifier is gone. What replaced it is a rule about the traffic itself.

The word boosted is worth pausing on, because it reaches further than search advertising. Putting money behind a social post that leads to an Amazon link is a boosted advertisement, and a great many affiliates do that without thinking of themselves as advertisers at all. Where an Amazon link may and may not be shared covers the social side of this, which has its own set of restrictions on top.

One more change from the same April update points the same direction: original content must now include “commentary, analysis or transformation for additional value”. Amazon and Google tightened the same screw in the same year, in nearly the same words.

The line that actually matters is intent, not shape

Put the two policies side by side and they are not describing a layout. Neither says “a page between an ad and a merchant is forbidden”. Both describe a page with nothing of its own — content replicated without added value, a page only used to link elsewhere, an intermediate step that exists for the advertiser’s convenience rather than the reader’s.

Which produces an awkward observation about the term itself. A thorough product review that recommends something and links to it is structurally identical to a bridge page: traffic arrives, reads, clicks out to a merchant. What separates them is whether the page would have been worth publishing if the affiliate link were removed.

That is a test you can actually apply, and it is more useful than the word:

• Would this page exist without the link? If deleting the affiliate link leaves nothing anybody would read, you have built the thing the policies describe.
• Could a reader arrive from anywhere else and be glad they did? Bridge pages are typically unreachable except through the ad, and that isolation is itself the tell.
• Does the page tell the reader something the merchant’s own page does not? This is Google’s “additional value” and Amazon’s “commentary, analysis or transformation” in plainer words.

What to build instead, if the traffic was the point

If you came to bridge pages because you wanted to buy traffic and send it to Amazon, the honest answer after April 2026 is that this route has closed, and no page design reopens it. The commission is what was being bought, and the commission is what the rule removes — and on Amazon’s current rate card the arithmetic was already tight enough that paid traffic rarely covered itself.

What still works is duller and slower, which is presumably why the technique was popular:

• Buy traffic to something you own the economics of — an email list, your own product, a service. Then Amazon links live in what you send afterwards, downstream of the ad rather than in its path. Note that Amazon’s own rules on links in email are narrower than most summaries suggest, so check that before building on it.
• Earn the arrival instead. Organic search, video, a newsletter people asked for. Unpaid traffic is untouched by the April clause, which is the whole point of it.
• Build the page that would survive its own link being deleted. A comparison, a genuine test, a specific problem answered specifically. This is the same page a bridge page pretends to be, and it also ranks.

For Amazon specifically, the constraint that catches people is upstream of any of this: the API credential that makes product data work is gated behind sales, and the three-sales rule starts its clock the day you apply. What you can build before the credential arrives is more than most people expect.

Common questions

The short version: the shape was never the problem. A page that only exists to move somebody along was always thin, and both platforms have now said so in writing. What changed in 2026 is that for Amazon the workaround no longer pays, whatever the page looks like.