Autopilot's advanced settings, explained
Autopilot works out of the box, but every part of a run is tunable. Here is what each setting actually controls, in plain language.
Updated July 15, 2026
First, three words: authority, page, domain
Several settings below lean on the same three ideas, so let's pin them down once.
Authority (DR) is a 0 to 100 estimate of how strong a site's own backlink profile is. A site that lots of other sites link to scores high; a brand-new blog scores low. A link from a high-authority site is worth more to you, because search engines treat it as a stronger vote of confidence.
The referring page is the specific page that would link to you, say, one blog post reviewing retro arcade finders. The domain is the site as a whole. The distinction matters because some filters look at the page (does this exact post get read?) and some look at the domain (is this site healthy overall?).
Here is the tradeoff behind all of it: higher authority is worth more but is harder to win. Owners of strong sites get more outreach and say yes less often. Small blogs say yes more readily, but each link moves the needle less. The first setting below exists to set that tradeoff for you.
Targeting strategy
Targeting strategy is the one setting that shapes the whole run. It picks where on the authority tradeoff your prospects come from:
Aims at lower-authority sites. More owners reply and agree, so you win links faster, but each individual link carries less weight.
A mix across the range. A sensible middle if you are not sure what you want yet.
Aims at stronger sites. Expect fewer yeses, but the links you do win are the valuable kind.
Run size and the grade filter
The prospect cap for the run: how many sites Autopilot will take through qualification. Whatever you set, the run is also capped to your remaining monthly credits, so it can never spend more than you have.
Which grades continue to drafting. Every qualified site gets a letter grade from A to F; this setting decides, for example, that only A and B sites get an email written, while C and below stop at Review leads.
Traffic and link filters
These four filters trim the prospect pool by the numbers. Each one uses the page-vs-domain distinction from the top of this article:
Only keep sites whose authority falls in this range. The minimum weeds out sites too weak to help you; the maximum weeds out sites so strong they are unlikely to answer cold outreach.
The referring page itself must get at least this much traffic. A link only sends visitors if the page it sits on actually gets read.
The site as a whole must fall in this traffic range. A floor filters out ghost towns; a ceiling filters out giants that rarely reply.
Skip pages that already link out to too many places. A page with hundreds of outbound links passes little value to any one of them, and it is a common shape for link farms.
Exclusions
Exclusions remove whole categories of sites from the run before they cost anything. The spam-type exclusions are on by default:
Government and university pages. Their links are prized, but they almost never respond to cold outreach, so most runs are better off without them.
Sites with over roughly 1,000 referring domains. At that size, one more inbound request rarely gets a reply.
Sites that appear to exist mainly to host links. A link from one can hurt more than it helps.
Pages where anyone can post a link. There is usually no owner to email and no editorial link to earn.
Outreach written in English to a page written in another language rarely lands.
Templates and budget
Pick a specific template for the run's emails, or leave it on auto-assign and let HeyLinks choose per prospect. For most prospects the smart generator writes the email from scratch, so auto-assign is the usual choice.
A dollar cap on the underlying data pulls for this run. If the run would cost more than your cap, it stops at the cap. Useful if you want a hard ceiling on spend per run.
Sensible defaults
The defaults are good, and the best first run is usually the one you do not tune. If you want to touch anything, touch these two first:
- Targeting strategy, because it sets the authority tradeoff for the whole run. Start with balanced, then lean small-blogs if you want faster wins or high-authority if you want fewer, stronger links.
- Grade filter, because it decides how picky drafting is. Tighten it to A and B if you would rather send fewer, better emails.