The state of search traffic for affiliates seems pretty screwed up right now. I've been trying to play with sending traffic directly from ads to aff merchants, but found that quite a few of them won't let you use their site as the display URL, which basically means you can't do direct-to-merchant because google will kill your ad if the display URL is different than where the ad sends the user.
So... if I make an ad that sends traffic to my landing page first, where I do a presell, is that considered search traffic? My guess is yes. What if I make a generic ad that sends traffic to my home page and the user navigates to my affiliate page - is that considered search traffic? Seems a bit of a grey area to me. Because they can't very well tell us we can't advertise our own sites via search ads.