Companies Using Rakuten Advertising

Rakuten Advertising is two businesses in one search result: the affiliate network that started as LinkShare, and the Rakuten name most shoppers know from cash back. This page is the network, and our October 2026 crawl counts its advertisers. A domain counts when it loads Rakuten's tag, from tag.rmp.rakuten.com, Rakuten's Shopify app or linksynergy.com, or sets the variables or cookie the tag uses. After two cuts that gives 4,024 live domains, 1,996 of them matched to a company, 20th of 96 in Affiliate & Referral with 1.27%.

Advertisers, almost entirely

The test could in principle catch publishers too, so I split it. Of the 4,023 domains in the cleaned set, 2,652 load the advertiser tag and 77 load it through the Shopify app. Only 36 show nothing but other linksynergy.com scripts, and most of those are Rakuten's older advertiser tags. The 1,253 with no readable script address are almost all matched by our second catalogue entry for the same tag. Publishers link to advertisers with plain hyperlinks, which the test doesn't read, so this is a list of brands.

Sales signal: every row here is a company paying affiliate commissions, not a blog earning them. Pitch it as a buyer list.

Why 5,737 became 4,024

The tag turns up on 5,737 domains. Our title filter removed 797, mostly Indonesian slot and lottery sites. The rest of the gap is one advertiser ID, 124165, which sat on more than 900 domains. Four of the six we opened were gambling sites built from copies of Jewson's site, the British builders' merchant, with Jewson's catalogue, Cookie Control banner and Facebook pixel still in the code beside the Rakuten tag. That fingerprint matched 1,497 domains, 581 already caught by the title filter, so the cut removed 916 more. 333 lookalikes with the same code but no readable tag stay in, because real UK retailers run that combination too; half of the 12 we opened were copies.

"Almost a third of the domains carrying Rakuten's tag weren't Rakuten advertisers. Take them out and you're left with fashion, beauty and hotel brands, half of them mid-sized." - Elif Arslan, CMO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: size this market on the cleaned 4,024 and the 1,406 advertiser IDs, not on a raw tag count.

Accounts behind the domains

On the 2,653 domains where the tag ID is readable there are 1,406 IDs, most of them on a single domain. The rest show how big advertisers use the network. Ramsey Solutions runs one ID across 58 domains, including rachelcruze.com and smartvestor.com, which redirect into its main site. Hilton runs one across 39, covering DoubleTree, Embassy Suites and Home2 Suites, and a campground franchise has one across 76 location domains.

Sales signal: at a hotel group or franchise, one affiliate team runs every brand. Find it once instead of prospecting each domain.

No trend line yet

The usage chart has one point, October's 4,024. Since we began tracking Rakuten on 16 March 2026, 3,784 domains dropped it on at least one hostname, and 344 still run it on another. That count covers every domain the tag was seen on, the removed copies included, and the set of domains we crawl turns over every month, so I wouldn't read those exits as advertisers leaving the network.

Sales signal: the exit count isn't evidence of a network losing brands. Don't build a churn pitch on it.

Who the advertisers are

30.51% of matched companies with a known size have 11 to 50 staff and 19.89% have 51 to 200, so half sit between 11 and 200; 31.84% have 10 or fewer and 117 have more than 1,000. Only 7.65% were founded in the 2020s. Fashion is the core: Retail Apparel and Fashion is 13.79% of matched companies, and with luxury goods and apparel the fashion rows reach 20.89%. MAC Cosmetics and Clinique run Rakuten through its Shopify app.

Sales signal: this is a mid-market and enterprise retail list. Merchandising, feed and creator tools aimed at fashion and beauty brands fit it well.

Brazil and Japan

The United States has 986 matched companies, the United Kingdom 306, Australia 142 and Canada 114. Then comes Brazil with 95: Reserva, Farm Rio, Animale, Osklen, Jequiti and Salon Line all load the tag, so Rakuten has a real Brazilian fashion and beauty book, with Petlove beside it. Japan has 45, including Rakuten's own brandavenue.rakuten.co.jp.

Sales signal: for an agency selling affiliate services in Brazil, Rakuten's Brazilian advertisers are a short, recognisable list to work by hand.

Beside other networks

366 Rakuten domains also run AWIN today, out of 569 ever seen with both, so it's common to run the two networks side by side. 96 run impact.com and 23 run CJ Affiliate. Movement is small and runs both ways: since March, 57 domains dropped AWIN and kept or added Rakuten, while 38 went the other way, and impact.com's flows are 33 in and 42 out. None passes our switching tests.

"Rakuten and AWIN share a lot of advertisers, and the small flows between them run in both directions. Brands use the two networks together, and we see no sign of one replacing the other." - Elif Arslan, CMO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: the 366 domains on both networks are brands running a multi-network programme. Reporting, deduplication and attribution tools belong there.

The stack around it

Shopify is on 48.05% of Rakuten domains and Salesforce Commerce Cloud on 5.07%. Google Tag Manager is on 94.56%. Floodlight (48.67%), Microsoft Advertising (44.22%) and Pinterest Ads (33.26%) show brands buying paid media, and OneTrust is on 13.25%. Cookie Control (12.03%) and Adobe's tag managers (11.88% and 12.98%) are partly the lookalike copies, so I'd discount them.

Sales signal: about half of these advertisers aren't on Shopify. Any tool sold to them needs enterprise commerce integrations as well.

What it costs

Rakuten Advertising doesn't publish advertiser pricing; its brand pages route you to a sales team. Its publisher page promises support without "nickel-and-dime fees" and lists Luxury, Retail, Finance and Travel among its verticals.

Key takeaways

1. 4,024 live domains after both cuts, 20th of 96 with 1.27%.

2. 1,713 of the 5,737 domains carrying the tag were removed, 916 of them for one copied advertiser ID.

3. It's an advertiser list: the publisher side is at most 36 domains.

4. Fashion and beauty brands lead, with a Brazilian cluster in fifth place by country.

5. AWIN is the usual second network, on 366 Rakuten domains.

How to use this list

Dedupe by advertiser ID, then filter by country and size. For the full list of 4,024 Rakuten Advertising domains with company, size and stack data, explore TechnologyChecker.io.