The manual pipeline, step by step

The manual pipeline is the same machinery Autopilot runs, just with you pressing each button. Work top to bottom through the sidebar and you will move a batch of prospects from "never heard of them" to "emailed, followed up, and replied."

1. Link Discovery

Link Discovery is the first tab of the Research area. It finds sites in your topic, so if you have not settled on a competitor yet, this is where you look around. For a retro arcade directory, it surfaces the other arcade finders and guides in that world.

What to do: browse what it finds and pick a competitor worth learning from. That choice feeds the next tab.

2. Link Extraction

Link Extraction is the second tab of the same Research area. Given a competitor, it pulls the pages that link to them, powered by industry-standard SEO data. These pages are your prospects: each owner already links out in your niche, which makes them a natural person to ask for a link insert.

Junk is filtered out automatically on the way in: forums, link farms, and pages in other languages never make it to your list. When the pull finishes, your prospects are ready for qualification.

The alternative entry: Import CSV

If you already have a list of pages (an Ahrefs export works as-is, or any CSV with a URL column), the Import CSV page brings it in and skips the two research steps entirely. Plain domains like example.com are fine as URLs.

One nice shortcut: if your CSV includes an Email column, those rows can skip qualification too and go straight to Review leads, with every address verified automatically on the way. Rows without an email go through normal qualification like everything else.

3. Qualify sites

Qualification is where raw URLs become real leads. For each site, HeyLinks captures a live screenshot of the page, finds a contact email and verifies it, extracts the exact paragraph around the competitor's link, detects what kind of page it is (blog post, homepage, and so on), applies spam filters, and produces a 0 to 100 score that maps to a letter grade from A to F.

Each site fully vetted costs one credit, charged only when the site is actually scored. What to do: pick the prospects to qualify and start the run, then watch the progress. When it finishes, your graded leads are waiting on the next page.

4. Review leads

Review leads is the approval gate. Every qualified site shows up here with its grade, screenshot, and details, and you decide which ones move forward. Approve the ones worth emailing, dismiss the rest. Nothing gets drafted or sent for a lead you have not approved.

Sites where no contact email could be found stay visible here too, so you can see exactly what your credits bought even when a site turned out to be unreachable.

5. Draft emails

Draft emails writes the outreach. For most prospects the smart generator writes each email from scratch: it reads the actual page (its title, the passage around the competitor's link, the page type) plus your project setup, points at something real on their page, and makes one small ask, to add your link. A quality gate checks every draft, and anything that fails it falls back to a clean template so nothing broken ever sends.

What to do: generate drafts for your approved leads, read them, and edit anything you want. There are also around ten built-in templates plus your own, if you prefer template-based emails for some prospects.

6. Send emails

Send emails sends from your own connected mailboxes, not from a shared address. Sending is paced to protect your reputation: per-mailbox daily caps with a gradual warm-up ramp for new mailboxes, sending windows in your timezone, and rotation across multiple mailboxes if you have them. If you hit a mailbox's daily cap, the rest simply queue and send after the reset.

Bounces are detected and the prospect is marked, opt-outs are honored automatically, and every email carries a proper unsubscribe path. What to do: approve your drafts for sending and let the schedule do the rest.

7. Follow-ups

Most replies come from follow-ups, and HeyLinks handles them automatically. The whole sequence (three steps by default, around days 3, 6, and 10, configurable up to five) is written up front as real editable drafts the moment a prospect is scheduled, so what you preview is exactly what sends.

A reply cancels all pending follow-ups within a minute or two. You can also skip any single step, and the rest stay on schedule.

8. Inbox

The Inbox collects every reply in one place, tagged by intent: agreed, wants more info, negotiating, referred you to someone, declined, or do not contact (that last one hard-stops everything to that person). When someone agrees, you can generate a reply draft that includes a paste-ready sentence with your link. You always review and press send yourself.

From here the Link tracker takes over: once a prospect agrees, their page is checked automatically and the link is marked live when it appears.

Where to go deeper

Each stage above has its own article when you want the full picture:

• Qualification and grading: "What a qualification credit buys you" and "How grading works: A to F"
• Drafting: "How the smart email generator works", "Personalization: what we read before we write", and "Templates vs the smart generator"
• Sending and follow-ups: "Mailboxes, daily limits, and warm-up" and "Follow-ups: how sequences work"
• Replies and results: "The inbox: replies, sentiment, and one-click reply drafts" and "The link tracker: how we confirm your links are live"
• Bringing your own data: "The CSV import guide: get your prospects in clean" and "Using HeyLinks without an Ahrefs key"