What you need to know
- After the Honey scandal, Google tightened its rules to stop shady affiliate link practices in Chrome extensions.
- Instead of just finding deals, Honey was secretly swapping affiliate links, cutting creators and influencers out of their earnings.
- Google’s new rules demand transparency, banning extensions from messing with shopping cookies or adding affiliate links without clear user consent.
The recent uproar over PayPal’s Honey extension, mainly its shady handling of affiliate links, has pushed Google to tighten the reins on its policies. The new rules lay down clear, strict guidelines for extensions, putting an end to the kind of sketchy behavior that sparked the whole fiasco in the first place.
Despite its claim to help users find the best deals and coupons, the Honey link scandal exposed a sneaky tactic of secretly swapping in affiliate links. This move siphoned potential earnings away from content creators and influencers who rely on those commissions.
Following the revelations, Google is tightening the rules on shopping extensions in the Chrome Web Store, as officially announced on its developer support portal (via 9to5Google).
For the uninitiated, Honey is a Chrome extension owned by PayPal that helps users find coupon codes at checkout. In exchange, it activates PayPal’s affiliate link, earning the company a commission on purchases made through the extension.
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Unfortunately, it turned out Honey was slapping its affiliate link on purchases left and right, even when it didn’t find any usable coupon codes. On top of that, it was caught swapping out existing affiliate links, effectively hijacking commissions that would’ve gone to others.
A win for transparency
Moving forward, Google Chrome extensions can only use affiliate links, discount codes, and cookies if they offer a clear, direct benefit at checkout, like real discounts or cash rebates. Extensions also can’t mess with shopping cookies or add affiliate links without upfront, transparent disclosure to users.
The new policy requires extensions to inject affiliate links only when triggered by a direct user action; a rule that effectively shuts down Honey’s old tactics.
The “related user action” rule is highlighted by cracking down on shady practices like: secretly tweaking shopping cookies while users browse online stores, sneaking in or swapping affiliate codes into URLs without permission, and slapping on or replacing promo codes without the user’s knowledge.
The Honey link fallout hurt creators and influencers, but the policy changes that came out of it is a win for everyone. They ensure Chrome extensions do what they promise, making the platform more transparent and trustworthy for users.