The short version
- Hard checks run before scoring. Spam, thin or dead pages, unsupported languages, failed analysis, an existing prominent link to you, relevance below 60, or placement suitability below 60 all reject the page outright.
- The score itself is five weighted components: placement suitability 35%, content relevance 30%, page quality and linkability 15%, audience and commercial intent 10%, competitor gap 10%.
- Tiers are fixed bands: exceptional at 90 and above, strong from 80, good from 70, possible from 50. Below that, a page is rejected automatically.
- The Opportunity Score measures editorial quality only. Whether you can reach anyone is a separate score — see the Priority Score.
- The combination is deterministic: the same inputs always produce the same score, and every component is visible with its reason.
Every link tool ranks its results. Very few will tell you how. You get a number between 0 and 100, a colour, and an implication that a proprietary model knows something you do not.
That is a bad trade for the person doing the outreach, because the number is only useful if you can decide when to override it. So the whole model is documented here.
Hard checks come first
Before anything is weighted, a page has to survive a set of gates. These are not inputs to the score — they are disqualifications, and a strong signal elsewhere cannot compensate for one.
| Rejection | Why it is absolute |
|---|---|
| Spam | A link from a spam page is a liability, not an asset. There is no score high enough to make it worth having. |
| Thin content | Pages with almost no substance do not hold editorial value and rarely survive their own site's next cleanup. |
| Dead page | A page that no longer resolves cannot be pitched, whatever it used to be. |
| Unsupported language | The analysis cannot responsibly judge placement fit in a language it cannot read, so it declines to guess. |
| Analysis failed | An incomplete record is not a low score — it is an unknown, and unknowns are not shipped as opportunities. |
| You are already prominently linked | You have the placement. Writing to ask for it signals you did not read the page. |
| Content relevance below 60 | Below this line, the page is not about your market, and no amount of placement fit changes that. |
| Placement suitability below 60 | Below this line, there is nowhere on the page you belong, however relevant it is. |
The two floors at 60 are the reason the list is short. Both have to clear. A page that is deeply relevant with no natural placement is not an opportunity — it is a page.
The five weighted components
What survives gets scored. The weights are fixed and public:
| Component | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Placement suitability | 35% | Whether this specific page has a natural place for a company like yours, and how good that place is. |
| Content relevance | 30% | How close the page's actual subject is to your market — judged from the content, not the title. |
| Page quality and linkability | 15% | Whether the page is substantial, maintained, and the kind of page that carries links well. |
| Audience and commercial intent | 10% | Whether the people reading it are plausibly your buyers, and whether they are reading it while making a decision. |
| Competitor gap | 10% | Whether competitors are present and you are not — the clearest kind of missing-from-this-page evidence. |
Opportunity quality
Best AI visibility platforms for SaaS
growthlab.example · Comparison roundup
Placement suitability
98 /100
Would adding your company make editorial sense on this specific page?
34.3 / 35 pts
Clears the 60-point floor
Content relevance
96 /100
How closely the actual article matches your product, market, and audience.
28.8 / 30 pts
Clears the 60-point floor
Page quality & linkability
88 /100
Substantial editorial content structured to support a useful link.
13.2 / 15 pts
Audience & commercial intent
92 /100
Whether readers are evaluating tools, alternatives, or solutions in your market.
9.2 / 10 pts
Competitor gap
88 /100
A bonus when relevant competitors are present while your company is absent.
8.8 / 10 pts
Reachability
scored separately0
- Verified contact78 × 35%
- Author or editor match100 × 25%
- Publisher reachability100 × 15%
- Contact seniority60 × 15%
- Contact confidence82 × 10%
A great article stays a great opportunity even before an email is found — which is why this never dilutes the editorial score.
Priority0= 94 × 75% + 85 × 25%· rank 1 across every active opportunity for the site.
Why placement outweighs relevance
Placement suitability carries the largest single weight at 35%, slightly ahead of relevance. That ordering is deliberate and it is the most consequential decision in the model.
Relevance is necessary but it is abundant: in any established market there are thousands of relevant pages. Placement is scarce. The pages where an editor could add you without rewriting their article — where there is a list, a comparison, a recommendation block, a gap in an enumeration — are a small fraction of the relevant ones, and they are the only ones where outreach has a realistic chance.
Weighting placement first means the ranking answers “where could this actually happen?” rather than “what is this about?”
The tiers
The final score lands in a fixed band. The bands exist so you can triage a list without reading every score:
| Tier | Range | How to read it |
|---|---|---|
| Exceptional | 90–100 | Strong placement, strong relevance, and usually a competitor gap. Pitch these first and personally. |
| Strong | 80–89 | A good fit with one softer component. Worth a well-researched email. |
| Good | 70–79 | Real, but the angle needs thought. Read the reasons before writing. |
| Possible | 50–69 | Qualified but marginal. Useful when a market is small or when you know something the model does not. |
| Rejected | Below 50 | Not selected. Still visible with its score and reason, and still promotable by hand. |
What this score does not include
The Opportunity Score is a measure of editorial quality and nothing else. It deliberately excludes whether a contact was found, whether that address was verified, and whether the publisher looks reachable.
Those belong to a separate Reachability Score, and the two are combined into a Priority Score for ranking. Keeping them apart is what stops a superb page with no listed contact from being scored as a bad page — it is a great opportunity that is hard to reach, and those are different problems with different solutions. That model is covered in the Priority Score.