Getting the best prospects on the built-in data source

Fewer results is the point, not a defect. Here is the recipe that produces pages actually worth emailing, and the measured reason a page traffic minimum of 1 is a real filter on this scale.

Updated August 4, 2026

The recipe

This is the setup we recommend on the built-in data source. It is what produced the best results in our own testing, and it is a good default to start from before you tune anything.

Pick competitors with roughly 5,000 to 10,000 referring domains

Big enough to have a real pool of pages linking to them, small enough that those pages are mostly run by people who answer their own email. Enormous competitors are mostly linked by news sites and aggregators that will never reply.

Set the strategy to Balanced

Balanced leaves the authority score alone and lets traffic do the quality work. On this data source the authority score is a looser signal than traffic, so filtering on it tends to throw away good pages.

Add page traffic, minimum 1

This is the single highest-value filter here. It keeps only pages that the data source believes real people actually visit. Read the section below before you assume 1 is too small a number to matter.

What that looks like in practice

On a real run of ours, about 5,000 referring pages came back through this recipe and produced 34 prospects genuinely worth contacting. That ratio is normal, and it is the ratio you want. Every page that gets filtered out is a qualification credit you did not spend on a page nobody reads.

Where to set it

On the Link Extraction page, add your competitors, then select the ones you want to pull. The controls sit in the bar that appears once competitors are selected.

The strategy pills (Small blogs, Balanced, High authority) are in that same bar, and on each competitor card. Click Balanced.

Below the strategy pills is the Advanced ranges row, with three pills: Authority, Root traffic, and Page traffic. Click Page traffic and a small popover opens with a From and a To box. Type 1 into From, leave To empty, and click Apply. An empty To means no upper limit. The pill then shows the range you set, so you can see at a glance that the filter is on, and a small x on the pill clears it again.

Applies to everything you selected

The Advanced ranges row applies to every competitor you have selected, as a custom filter. You do not have to set it one card at a time.

Why fewer results is the point

It is tempting to judge a pull by how many rows come back. That is the wrong measure. Every page you pull is a page you may later spend a qualification credit on, and every page you email costs you a little of your sending reputation. A pile of 5,000 dead pages is worse than nothing, because it buries the handful that would have replied.

So we filter hard on purpose. Junk hosts, dead domains, foreign-language pages, and pages with no measurable readership all get dropped before you ever see them. When a pull returns a few dozen prospects instead of a few thousand, the filtering worked. The pages that survived are the ones where a real person might read your email and click into their own post to add your link.

Why a minimum of 1 is a real filter

A minimum of 1 visit a month sounds like it would let almost anything through. On this data source it does not, and we measured exactly why.

The built-in source estimates traffic differently from an industry-standard tool like Ahrefs. Its numbers are coarser. So a raw 1 on its scale is not the same claim as a raw 1 elsewhere. It is closer to a yes or no answer about whether the page has any readership at all, and that turns out to be a strong signal.

We checked this against 5,000 real referring pages where we also had Ahrefs figures to compare with. Here is what each threshold actually buys you:

At least 1

90% genuinely have traffic

Typical real value about 43 visits a month. The recommended setting. Nine out of ten kept pages have real readers.

At least 10

95% genuinely have traffic

Typical real value about 88 visits a month. A little stricter. Use it if you are getting more prospects than you can email.

At least 100

99% genuinely have traffic

Typical real value about 594 visits a month. Very strict. Expect a small list of strong pages, and expect a lower reply rate, since bigger pages get more outreach.

Read the first row again. Setting the minimum to 1 means roughly 90 percent of the pages you keep genuinely have traffic, and the typical one gets around 43 visits a month. That is not a rounding error. It is a real blog post that real people land on.

Start at 1, tighten later

Going from 1 to 10 buys you 5 points of accuracy and costs you a lot of volume. Start at 1. Only raise it if you are consistently pulling more prospects than you have capacity to email.

Why page traffic makes a better link

A backlink on a page nobody visits is a line of code in a database. A backlink on a page that gets 43 visits a month is something a person can actually click.

That difference matters twice over. First, those clicks are real visitors arriving at your site with intent, before any search engine has an opinion about it. Second, a page with genuine readership sends genuine user signals, and a link sitting on it looks like what it is: an editorial mention on a page people read. A link on a page with no readers has none of that behind it.

It also predicts who replies. A page with traffic usually has someone still tending it. A page with zero traffic is often abandoned, and abandoned sites do not answer outreach.

Reading the numbers correctly

The built-in source runs on its own scale, and that scale is higher than Ahrefs. Measured across the same pages:

Page traffic

2.85x

higher than the Ahrefs figure for the same page, on average.

Root domain traffic

3.76x

higher than the Ahrefs figure for the same site, on average.

The practical rule: compare these numbers against each other, never against an Ahrefs number. A site showing 3,000 monthly visitors here is not a 3,000 visitor site by Ahrefs reckoning. It is closer to 800. That is why the presets on this source use wider, higher bands than the Ahrefs presets. They were calibrated on real results rather than copied across.

The same caution applies to the authority score. It is the data source's own 0 to 100 score, not Ahrefs DR, and it reads noticeably higher for the same site. Use it to rank sites within one list, not to judge a site in absolute terms.