Siren's Vocabulary, Translated

A reward rule that fires on a single transaction.

A named configuration that pays a reward when a specific event happens. Programs hold their own commission rate, attribution model, and filters. Most things other affiliate plugins call a 'program' or 'commission setting' end up as a program in Siren.

A reward rule that fires on a schedule, not per-transaction.

A named configuration that pays out based on aggregated performance over a time window. Think monthly top-performer bonuses, quarterly revenue shares, or milestone pools. Where a program asks 'what just happened?', a distributor asks 'what happened this month?'

A set of programs where only one is allowed to pay per conversion.

When two programs could both fire on the same sale, putting them in a program group tells Siren to pick one winner using an attribution rule (first touch, last touch, top score, and so on). Useful when you have a VIP tier and a standard tier and don't want both paying out on the same order.

A pre-built program configuration you install with one click.

A fully resolved JSON config bundling one or more programs, program groups, and distributors. Recipes are what most Siren users start from instead of designing programs from scratch. Customize the rates and apply it to your site in a single step.

Anyone who can earn from a program.

The generic term for a person or organization eligible to earn. Affiliates, course instructors, marketplace vendors, revenue-share partners, and internal sales reps are all collaborators. What's different between them is which programs they're enrolled in, not their type.

A collaborator being attached to a specific program.

A collaborator only earns from programs they're enrolled in. One collaborator can be enrolled in many programs, which is how Siren handles 'VIP affiliates on a 30% program' and 'standard affiliates on a 10% program' as the same thing wearing different hats.

A tracked moment when a collaborator did something meaningful.

A referral-link click, a coupon use, a product owned by a creator when it sells, a course being completed. Each of these is an engagement type. Programs fire based on which engagement types they're configured to listen for.

The thread Siren uses to tie visits, clicks, and purchases to the same person.

Each visitor gets an opportunity ID. When that visitor later buys something or submits a form, Siren walks back through the opportunity's engagements to figure out which collaborator earns credit. Most attribution decisions happen at the opportunity level.

The event that actually awards a commission.

A conversion is whatever you've told the program counts. A sale, a form submission, a lesson completion, a subscription renewal. Once one fires, Siren creates a commission record for the winning collaborator.

The rule Siren uses to pick who wins when multiple people could earn credit.

Some programs credit whoever touched the customer most recently (last-click). Others credit the first person in the chain (first-touch). Some split credit evenly across everyone who contributed, and others weight it by how much each person did. Each program picks a rule, and program groups can override it when programs overlap.

The calculated amount owed to a collaborator for a single conversion.

A program creates a commission when its conditions are met on a transaction. Commissions start as 'pending' and move to 'approved' (ready to pay) or 'rejected' after any refund or review window passes.

What you currently owe a collaborator, rolled up from their commissions.

Obligations are how Siren tracks running balances. As commissions get approved, they raise a collaborator's obligation. When you pay them, the obligation drops.

A record that says 'we paid this collaborator this amount'.

Fulfillments close out obligations. You can record them manually, export them to your payroll system, or bulk-process them from the Siren admin.

The running history of everything Siren did to a record, visible on that record's detail screen.

Every major record in Siren (collaborator, conversion, obligation, fulfillment, engagement, transaction) has an activity feed on its detail screen. The feed is a chronological timestamped log of each lifecycle event: an obligation being issued, a conversion being approved, a refund reversing a payment. The same event can appear on several records at once because lifecycle events link to every record they touch. It's the fastest way to answer 'what happened here?' without asking a developer to check logs.

A single timestamped entry in an activity feed.

Notes are the individual records that make up an activity feed. Siren writes them automatically as lifecycle events happen. Each one carries a blueprint key (for example `obligation_issued`), rendered display text, and links to every record the event touched. Developers can also query notes directly via the `/notes` REST endpoint with a source-type + source-id filter.

The structured JSON that defines a program, distributor, or recipe.

Every program and distributor has an underlying config. Recipes are one or more configs bundled together. If you've seen fields like `engagementTypes` in Siren's developer docs, those live inside a config.

An explicit link between a collaborator and something they get credit for.

Mappings tell Siren 'this creator owns this product' or 'this rep owns this coupon code.' Programs that track ownership (royalties, coupon-based programs, vendor revenue shares) use mappings to decide who earns.

A WordPress plugin Siren watches for conversions.

WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, LifterLMS, LearnDash, Gravity Forms, and NorthCommerce are supported integrations. Each one exposes its own engagement types (for example, LifterLMS adds course-completed and lesson-completed).

A signed one-time link that applies a recipe to your Siren installation.

When you click 'Use this recipe,' Siren's website generates a signed URL. Opening it on your Siren admin applies the recipe's programs, program groups, and distributors in one step.

When an AI agent completes a purchase on behalf of a human, without the human opening a browser.

The pattern where an AI assistant (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, or a merchant-embedded agent) handles product discovery, cart construction, and checkout for the user. The user never visits the merchant's site, which weakens click-only attribution in the channels most exposed to AI-assisted discovery. Examples include ChatGPT Commerce instant checkout, Google's UCP, and Shopify Agentic Commerce. Programs that attribute on bound artifacts (bound content, partner-specific products, unique coupon codes) keep earning correctly regardless of whether the click fires.

Google's open protocol that lets AI agents complete purchases without the user leaving the assistant.

Universal Commerce Protocol is an open standard merchants can implement to expose product data and a checkout endpoint to AI agents. An agent (Gemini, Search AI Mode, or third-party assistants) can read the UCP surface, construct a cart, authenticate payment, and complete the order inside the assistant interface. For affiliate programs, UCP means that in the categories where agent-mediated checkout gets real traction, a growing share of conversions arrive without any referral click, UTM, or cookie. Coupon codes are the baseline response; bound content, partner-specific products, and landing-page binding are the stronger primitives.

The open protocol AI assistants use to query specialized tools and knowledge sources.

Model Context Protocol is an open standard that lets AI assistants (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, and others) connect to external servers that expose tools and data. Siren's own Beacon is an MCP server: it makes every Siren feature, recipe, and configuration pattern queryable by any MCP-compatible AI. Whether individual affiliate programs should build their own MCP endpoints is still speculative — Beacon exists because Siren is an AI product people build with, and that case is different from most affiliate programs today.

Affiliates are collaborators enrolled in an affiliate-style program.

The same record type can also represent an instructor, a vendor, or a referral partner depending on which programs they're enrolled in.

What other tools configure as 'the commission rate,' Siren models as a named program.

Instead of a global rate with per-affiliate overrides, Siren lets you have several programs with different rates and enroll collaborators in whichever applies.

A 'referral' in other tools typically combines the tracked event and the calculated payout.

Siren separates these: the conversion is the qualifying event, and the commission is the payout record tied to a specific program and collaborator.

What other tools call 'tiers' are usually their own programs in Siren.

A VIP tier becomes its own program with its own rate. Program groups then make sure only one tier pays per sale.