What Autopilot does, phase by phase
Press Start and Autopilot runs the pipeline end to end: it discovers prospects, qualifies them, drafts the emails, and stages everything for your review.
Updated July 15, 2026
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:
Each phase shows live progress while it runs, so you always know where the run is.
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. Autopilot starts from your target keyword and finds the sites already ranking for it. Those are your competitors. It then 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.
Autopilot finds those competitors itself, from your keyword. Competitors you add by hand are used by the manual Link Discovery and Link Extraction tools instead, so adding more of them does not change what Autopilot searches.
Obvious junk is filtered out before it costs you anything. With the default settings that means 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.
25 is just the starting value of the qualification budget slider. You set that number before each run, and it is capped by the credits left on your plan.
- Up to 25 credits spent, one per site fully vetted
- A draft is written for every vetted site that has a findable, verified email
- Sites without a usable email stay in Review leads with everything we learned
How many end up with an email varies by niche, so we do not quote a rate here. Junk filtered out before scoring never costs a credit at all.
So whatever budget you set does not promise that many sendable leads. It spends up to that many credits honestly vetting sites, and you are only charged for sites actually vetted. If your niche runs out of new sites before the budget does, the run stops early and tells you, rather than spending the rest on padding.