Plan B

Every publisher running cloaked, geo-targeted links to regulated brands has the same expensive problem: a meaningful slice of incoming traffic comes from regions the publisher hasn't declared a deal for, and that traffic dies. The cookie loads, the redirect fires, the visitor lands on a dead URL, a non-compliant brand, or a fallback so generic it tells the visitor "you shouldn't be here". The click is lost and so is the revenue.

Plan B is the opt-in safety net for that situation. When a click arrives from a geo your declared brands don't cover, the redirect service hands the visitor off to a Plan B landing page instead of failing silently. The page presents the top three compliant alternatives matched to the visitor's geo and vertical, lets them choose, and gets them somewhere they can actually convert. You stay in control of which brands appear and how the page looks. The pitch to publishers is exact: "We've got your back. You never lose a click again."

The full version covers Stage 1 (the manual setup) and Stage 2 (continuously updated top-three lists computed in the background per (publisher, vertical, geo) combination, served from a dedicated cache to keep latency near zero).

Once Plan B is enabled on your account, the following becomes available:

• A fallback landing page for every cloaked link that's hit by an unmatched geo. The page renders in under 500ms with the visitor's region, the original destination, and the top three alternatives presented in your chosen template.
• Top three alternatives per visitor matched against vertical and geo. The ranking pulls from your declared brand catalog first, then fills any remaining slots from Routy's curated fallback pool for that vertical and geo. So a US sportsbook publisher hit by a visitor from a state they don't cover sees other sportsbook brands licensed in that state, not unrelated offers.
• Template choice — pick from three to five visual treatments at launch, including light/dark themes, card-grid vs hero-style layouts, and vertical-specific aesthetics (casino vs sportsbook vs general). Each template renders the same three brand cards with logo, one-line offer, and CTA, plus a discoverable "continue to original site anyway" link.
• Force-continue path — visitors who don't want an alternative can take the original URL anyway. The redirect skips the geo check this time around, the visitor lands on the original brand, and the click is recorded with the force flag so your reporting knows it happened.
• Rev-share split on Routy fallback brands — if a visitor converts on a brand from Routy's fallback pool (rather than your own catalog), the commission flows back to your account on a configurable split. So Plan B doesn't just save the click; it can produce revenue from clicks you couldn't have monetised otherwise.
• Per-publisher preferences — mark specific brands as preferred so they always appear in the top three when they match the geo and vertical, or let Routy's ranking handle ordering automatically.
• Click-level visibility in your reporting. Every Plan B redirect is flagged separately from a normal click; every follow-on click (alternative chosen, or force-continue) is a separate record. So you can measure both the volume of clicks Plan B is saving and what portion of them are converting on alternatives vs going back to the original.

The Routy fallback pool matters more than it sounds. Most affiliates running regulated verticals have negotiated deals with maybe a dozen brands. Plan B's fallback pool covers far more, in far more regions. So the "we've got your back" promise actually holds even for geos and verticals where your catalog has zero coverage.

The flow runs across three components: the existing Routy redirect service, the Plan B landing page (a small Next.js app), and a dedicated cache for the per-publisher top-three lists.

When a visitor clicks a cloaked link, the redirect service runs the geo check it already runs today. On a match, the visitor goes to the original destination as usual. On a mismatch, instead of failing the redirect, the service 302s the visitor to planb.routy.com with the publisher ID, vertical, the visitor's geo, and the original URL encoded.

The Plan B app fetches the pre-computed top three for that (publisher, vertical, geo) key from a dedicated cache instance. The cache is populated by a backend job that runs on a schedule (hourly by default, configurable) and recomputes when your catalog changes. The lookup is sub-millisecond; the rendered page hits the visitor in well under half a second. If the cache somehow returns empty for that geo (rare, but possible during the first hours after a new geo gets traffic), the page auto-redirects the visitor to the original URL with the force flag so they never see a broken experience.

Click records stay immutable across the whole flow. The original click that triggered Plan B is recorded once, marked with the Plan B flag. The follow-on click — whether the visitor picked an alternative or forced through to the original — is recorded separately. Analytics joins the two records by session and time window. So you get a clean before-and-after view of how often Plan B is intervening and what's happening downstream, without any of the messy state mutation that other "fallback" implementations rely on.

A few things worth knowing about the rollout:

• Stage 1 ships with the redirect flow, the landing page, and the templates working against a static fallback set per publisher. No publisher-side configuration beyond a toggle and template selection.
• Stage 2 ships the dynamic top-three pre-computation from your catalog plus Routy's fallback pool, with the configurable ranking and the rev-share splits live.
• Both stages keep the same publisher-facing surface — a single toggle, a template picker, optional preferred-brand marking. The shift between stages is transparent to you.

Preview the templates

Four template designs are in active development for the launch. Each one renders the same brand data but with a distinctly different visual identity, so the look matches the audience the publisher is speaking to. Live previews using mock brand data:

• Helpful (light, friendly) — soft gradient background, equal-weight three-card grid, helpful-not-apologetic copy. Works for most verticals and audiences.
• Sportsbook (dark, urgent) — high-contrast dark theme, hero-style with the top pick taking the spotlight, aggressive sportsbook aesthetic. Built for verticals where the visitor expects energy.
• Editorial (light, minimal) — pure white, serif headlines, vertical list layout. Feels like a content site or review page rather than a sales landing. Built for publishers whose audience expects an editorial experience.
• Clean (modern, SaaS) — vendor-neutral. Single bordered card on a soft-grey background, system sans, no decorative gradients or theme colours. Designed to coexist with whatever brand identity the publisher already has rather than impose Routy's.

A fifth casino-aesthetic template with glassmorphism and gold accents is on the roadmap for launch. Publishers can switch templates at any time without re-routing or re-tagging anything.

The numerical case is straightforward. Most regulated-vertical publishers we've talked to estimate that 10 to 25 percent of their incoming clicks fall through to a non-converting destination because of geo mismatches. At the volumes a serious affiliate operation runs, that's enough lost revenue per month to fund a full-time employee. The conversion rate on Plan B's top-three alternatives doesn't need to be high to recover most of that loss — even a 20 to 30 percent click-through to one of the alternatives recaptures the majority of the previously-dead traffic.

The strategic case is about defensibility. The platforms that hold publishers long-term are the ones that solve operational problems too painful to ignore. Geo mismatch in regulated verticals is exactly that kind of problem — it's been an open wound for as long as US iGaming has existed at state-by-state granularity, and there's no off-the-shelf fix anyone else has shipped. Being the platform that solves it is the kind of moat that survives the next round of pricing pressure.

The product case is about visitor experience. The visitors who land in geos you don't cover today don't blame the regulator; they blame the publisher and the brand. A Plan B page that hands them a relevant, compliant alternative changes the impression from "this site is broken" to "this site went out of its way to help me". Visitor sentiment metrics, return-visit rates, and direct-traffic share all benefit from that shift.