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Not every affiliate match will be relevant to your audience. A fitness chatbot probably shouldn’t return craft supplies, and a tech review app doesn’t need pet food links. Category filtering lets you control what types of products ChatAds returns. You can configure these in your dashboard under Rules.

1. Add Allowed Affiliate Categories

Restrict results to only the categories that make sense for your product. If you run a fitness app, you might allow only Sports, Fitness, & Outdoors and Health & Beauty. ChatAds will skip any extracted product that doesn’t fall into your allowed list. Available categories:
Category
Arts & Crafts
Automotive
Baby & Kids
Electronics
Fan Shop (Sports)
Fashion & Apparel
Health & Beauty
Home & Kitchen
Musical Instruments
Office Products
Patio, Lawn, & Garden
Pet Supplies
Sports, Fitness, & Outdoors
Tools & Home Improvement
Toys & Games
Allowed categories decrease fill rates since products outside your list are filtered out. But the offers you do get will be more relevant to your users.

2. Add Excluded Affiliate Categories

If you’d rather keep things open but block a few categories, use exclusions instead. This is more permissive than defining allowed categories — everything is included except what you explicitly block. For example, a general-purpose chatbot might exclude Toys & Games and Baby & Kids if its audience skews older.
Use allowed categories when you know exactly what fits your product. Use excluded categories when most things are fine but a few categories don’t belong.

Auto-Blocked Categories

ChatAds automatically excludes the following categories from results. These tend to be low-value or noisy:
  • Amazon Programs (Alexa Skills, Amazon Explore, Amazon Pharmacy, Amazon Warehouse, AWS Courses, Just for Prime)
  • Apps & Games
  • Books & Kindle
  • Collectibles
  • Credit & Payment Cards
  • Digital & Physical Media (Music, Movies, Video, VHS)
  • Gift Cards
  • Grocery
  • Handmade Products
  • Scientific & Industrial
  • Software
  • Subscription Services (Subscribe & Save, Subscription Boxes)
These are always filtered — no configuration needed.

3. Send US Traffic Only

Our product catalog and affiliate resolution are focused on the US market. Messages from non-US users will return fewer matches, irrelevant products, or empty results. Use the country or ip parameter to let ChatAds detect geography, or filter non-US traffic on your end before making the call.

4. Use Brand Only Mode

Enable Brand Only in your dashboard to restrict offers to brand + product combinations. Instead of matching generic terms like “yoga mat” or “running shoes” — which could resolve to any listing — Brand Only ensures ChatAds only returns offers when it detects a specific brand like “Lululemon yoga mat” or “Nike Pegasus.” This trades fill rate for precision, since generic mentions are skipped entirely.

5. Set Product Quality Filters

Set minimum thresholds for price, review count, and star rating in the Rules tab under Product Quality Filters. These filters drop resolved products that don’t meet your bar — for example, requiring at least 100 reviews and 4 stars ensures you only surface well-reviewed products to your users. All three are optional and off by default. Tighter filters lower fill rate but improve the quality of the products that do get through.

6. Curate What You Send ChatAds

You know your users better than we do. Before calling the API, apply your own filters on the messages you send. If a user is asking for emotional support, filing a complaint, or discussing something sensitive, that’s probably not the right moment for an affiliate link. Similarly, if a message is purely conversational (“how’s the weather?”), it won’t produce useful offers and just adds to your request count. Filter on your end first — only send messages where a product recommendation would actually make sense. This improves both quality and cost efficiency since you’re not burning requests on messages that were never going to convert.

Next Steps

Dashboard Rules

Configure categories in your dashboard

No Offers

Diagnose why the API returns no offers