How grading works: A to F
Every vetted site gets a 0 to 100 score, shown as a letter grade. Here's what feeds the score, what the letters mean in practice, and how to put them to work.
Updated July 15, 2026
Where the 0 to 100 score comes from
When a site is qualified, everything we learn about it rolls up into a single score from 0 to 100. That score blends three kinds of signal:
- Site strength. Quality signals for the site itself, like its authority and traffic. Authority is a 0 to 100 estimate of how strong a site's own backlink profile is. A link from a stronger site is worth more to you.
- Page relevance. How closely the specific page matches your topic. A link from a page about your subject carries more weight than one from a page that happens to mention it in passing.
- Contact quality. Whether we found a contact email and how solid it is. A verified email beats an unverified one, because outreach only matters if it can actually land in someone's inbox.
The score then maps to a letter grade from A to F, which is what you'll mostly look at day to day. The number is there when you want the finer detail; the letter is there so you can sort a hundred leads in a minute.
What A to F mean in practice
A and B are your best prospects: a solid site, a relevant page, and a reachable contact. C is workable, often a smaller site or a page that is only partly on topic. It can absolutely be worth a shot, especially early on when smaller sites tend to say yes more often. D and F mean something significant is weak: the site, the relevance, the contact, or all three. They are usually not worth your sending capacity.
An A site vs an F site
Say you run retroarcadefinder.com, a directory of retro arcades. Here is what the two ends of the scale typically look like:
- A well-kept gaming blog with healthy authority and steady traffic
- The page is squarely about retro arcades, your exact topic
- It already links out to a rival arcade directory
- A verified contact email for the author
- A thin site with almost no authority or traffic of its own
- Arcades get one sentence in a list of fifty unrelated ideas
- The competitor link is buried and barely on topic
- No findable contact email anywhere on the site
The A site is a real person who writes about your world and can be reached. The F site would cost you an email (and a little sender reputation) for almost no chance of a link worth having.
Using grades day to day
In Review leads: use the grade to work the pile top down. Start with your A and B leads, approve the ones whose screenshots and pages look right, then dip into the C pile when you want more volume. D and F are there for completeness, but skipping them is almost always the right call.
In Autopilot: the advanced settings include a grade filter that decides which grades continue on to drafting. If you only want emails written for your strongest prospects, set it to A and B and Autopilot will vet everything but only draft for the grades you chose.