Priority Score: ranking by what you can actually do

Suppose two pages come out of qualification. The first is an exceptional placement on a well-run industry blog, and nobody at that publisher lists an address anywhere. The second is a good-not-great roundup where the author's email is published on the page and verifies clean.

Which should be at the top of your list this morning?

A single score cannot answer that honestly. Collapse both facts into one number and you lose the ability to tell a great opportunity you cannot reach from a mediocre one — and those call for completely different responses. The first needs research; the second needs an email.

Two scores, one ranking

Dice therefore keeps two scores and derives a third.

1. 01

   Opportunity Score — editorial quality

   Placement suitability, content relevance, page quality, audience intent, and competitor gap. Covered in full in the Opportunity Score. It says nothing about contacts.

2. 02

   Reachability Score — can you get to a human

   Built from the contacts actually found for the publisher's domain, plus whether the publisher looks reachable at all.

3. 03

   Priority Score — the working order

   A weighted combination: 75% opportunity quality, 25% reachability. This is what the list is sorted by.

Inside the Reachability Score

Two details in there matter more than their weights suggest.

Addresses that verify as invalid or disposable are removed before scoring, not scored low. A dead address is not weak evidence of reachability; it is a liability. Sending to it damages the sending reputation of your own domain, and that damage is permanent in a way a missed opportunity is not.

An unknown publisher scores 50, not 0. When there is genuinely no signal about whether a publisher answers email, the model says so by sitting in the middle. Treating unknown as failure would systematically bury every small publisher that has not been catalogued anywhere — exactly the publishers most likely to reply.

A dead address is not weak evidence of reachability. It is a liability, and it is removed before anything is scored.

Why 75% / 25%

The split encodes a judgement worth stating plainly: editorial fit is the thing that is hard to change, and reachability is the thing you can work on.

If a page has no natural place for your product, no amount of contact research fixes it. But an excellent page with no contact is a research task — check the masthead, look at who has written there recently, find them elsewhere. Weighting reachability at a quarter keeps those opportunities visible near the top where you will actually do that work, while still ensuring that between two comparable pages, the one you can reach today wins.

The ranking also uses deliberate tiebreakers below the score itself — placement suitability, contact verification confidence, and how recently the page was validated — so two opportunities with identical priority still land in a stable, defensible order rather than an arbitrary one.

Reranking is global, not local

When new contacts are found, when an address is verified, when someone unsubscribes, or when the next batch of candidates is qualified, every active opportunity for that site is rescored and reordered together.

This is the only correct behaviour, and it is worth being explicit about why. A rank is a statement about position relative to everything else. Recomputing one row and leaving the rest alone produces a list where row 3 was ranked against last week's data and row 4 against today's — an ordering that is quietly wrong everywhere and obviously wrong nowhere.

How contacts are found in the first place — and why some opportunities have several while others have none — is covered in how contact discovery works.