What Autopilot does, phase by phase

One click, three phases

Autopilot is the same pipeline you can run by hand, compressed into one button. It moves through three working phases and ends at a fourth state where the work waits for you:

The run size is capped to your remaining monthly credits. If you have 25 credits left and ask for a bigger run, the progress screen shows the run clamped to 25, so a run can never spend credits you do not have.

Phase 1: Discovering

Discovering builds the prospect list. Starting from your competitor, Autopilot pulls the pages that link to them, powered by industry-standard SEO data. Each of those pages is a potential home for your link, because its owner already links out in your niche.

Obvious junk is filtered automatically before it costs you anything: forums, link farms, and pages in other languages never enter the run.

Phase 2: Qualifying

Qualifying vets each discovered site, one credit per site fully vetted. For every site, HeyLinks captures a live screenshot, finds and verifies a contact email, extracts the exact paragraph around the competitor's link, detects the page type, applies spam filters, and produces a 0 to 100 score with a letter grade from A to F.

This is the phase you watch on the progress screen: it counts up live as "X of Y sites vetted." The Y is the run size, already clamped to your remaining credits. You can also tell Autopilot which grades are allowed to continue to drafting, so weak sites stop here instead of getting an email written.

Phase 3: Drafting

Drafting writes a personalized email for each qualified site that passed your grade filter and has a contact email. The generator reads the actual page (its title, the passage around the competitor's link, the page type) plus your project setup, and writes each email from scratch: it 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 falls back to a clean template, so nothing broken ever reaches your review pile.

Ready for review

When drafting finishes, the run is done and every email is staged as a ready-to-send draft. From here it is exactly like the manual pipeline: read each draft, edit anything you like, and approve the ones you want to send.

The honest math

Credits count sites qualified, not emails sent, and it is worth knowing the difference before your first run. A qualified site with no findable contact email cannot receive an email. It still shows up in Review leads with everything we learned about it, but no draft is written for it.

So a 25-credit run does not guarantee 25 sendable leads. It guarantees 25 honestly vetted sites, which is the part worth paying for.