What a supplier's guarantee actually means
You bought a placement. Months later the buyer messages: the link is gone.
What happens next depends entirely on what the supplier agreed at the time, and on whether you can still prove it. Most resellers lose these arguments not because the supplier refuses, but because too much time passed and nobody was watching.
The terms you will actually see
Six months is the common one. It usually sits in a banner row at the top of a price sheet, or in a WhatsApp message from the day you started working together. Within that window a link that disappears is replaced or refunded.
Lifetime appears on more expensive sites and on sites the supplier owns.
Nothing at all is the most common of the three, and it is the one people read wrongly.
Silence means lifetime, not none
If a supplier never stated a term, they sold you a permanent link. That is what the transaction was: you paid for a link on a page, with no end date mentioned by either side.
Treating silence as "no guarantee" hands the supplier a term they never asked for. When a link dies on a site with no stated guarantee, the claim is stronger, not weaker.
Worth saying plainly when you raise it: you did not set a term, so this was sold as permanent, and it is gone.
One failed check is not a dead link
The temptation, once you start watching links, is to check often and act immediately. Both are wrong.
Sites go down. A publisher's host has a bad hour, a certificate expires over a weekend, a firewall decides your checker is a bot. Every one of those looks exactly like a removed link if you only look once.
Two things fix it. Check infrequently — a fortnight is plenty, since a link that vanished this morning is no more urgent than one that vanished ten days ago. And require two checks to agree before calling anything broken. A false accusation costs you more with a supplier than two weeks of waiting ever will.
There is a subtler version of the same mistake. A link that was reported missing, and on the next check comes back as page removed, has not been fixed — it has failed twice for two different reasons. Treating the second failure as a fresh start makes a dead link look like it recovered, and the supplier ends up paying twice for one loss, or not at all.
What a claim should contain
Not an accusation. A record.
- The URL the article was on
- The anchor text and the target it pointed to
- When it was published, and when the supplier's term ends
- What was found, and on which dates — including that it was checked twice
- What you are asking for: a replacement, or a refund
Most suppliers, given that, replace the link. Some refund. Some apologise and do nothing. A few stop replying — and that is information too.
Keep the record per order, not per site
The mistake that ruins reconciliation later: storing the supplier on the site rather than on the order.
You will buy the same domain from two suppliers over time. If the site row only remembers the most recent one, every past order silently re-attributes itself, and a claim against the supplier who actually sold you that placement becomes impossible to make.
Each order should freeze its own supplier, its own cost, and its own guarantee term at the moment it was placed. That way a claim two years later still knows who owes you.
The part nobody automates
Watching is mechanical and worth automating. Deciding is not.
Whether to push a supplier who has replaced three links this quarter, whether to keep buying from them at all, whether a particular buyer needs telling before they notice — those are judgements about relationships. A tool should put the facts in front of you with the days remaining on the guarantee, and then stay out of the way.