If affiliate clicks are being generated without a legitimate referral, advertisers may be paying commissions on sales that would have occurred anyway. This means Phia’s alleged conduct directly damaged merchants’ bottom lines.

The scale is potentially much larger than Honey’s as well. 

Affiliate marketing typically represents only a portion of an advertiser’s online sales, meaning Honey could affect only transactions already flowing through the affiliate channel. 

Forced clicks, by contrast, reach a larger share of commerce activity.

As Edelman told me, “with forced clicks, both click-through rate and revenue per user will be implausibly high.” These economics should have raised questions internally.

Edelman is unequivocal about intent. He calls it “misconduct,” and outright rejects that this behavior could have come from a software bug: “Based on the nature of the violation, forcing clicks is not something that can be unintentional.”

Another notable aspect of Edelman’s research is that the alleged behavior appears to be concentrated on mobile through an iOS Safari extension, rather than a traditional desktop browser extension. 

Historically, desktop extensions have received far greater scrutiny from researchers, networks and competing publishers. Whether the mobile implementation was intentionally chosen to avoid detection or simply exploited an area that receives less oversight remains an open question.

For the digital marketing ecosystem, however, the most important question is not what Phia allegedly did. It is why the broader ecosystem failed to detect it sooner.

Affiliate marketing depends on trust. Publishers trust that legitimate referrals will be credited. Advertisers trust that commissions reflect genuine incremental value. Consumers trust that cashback and loyalty programs operate fairly. Every high-profile controversy erodes that confidence, regardless of whether it involves Honey, Phia or the next shopping assistant.

As shopping increasingly shifts toward AI-powered agents and browser automation, the industry’s reputation will depend less on its ability to track commissions and more on its ability to demonstrate that those commissions were legitimately earned.