Help & FAQs

Getting started

Three concepts to learn, in order:

1. Campaign — a project (e.g. Photography Portfolio). Holds your reports, exclusions, and prospects.
2. Report — a single search run. Each report has a type (Guest Posting, Reviews, Forums, etc.), up to 5 research phrases, and a set of advanced options.
3. Prospect — a URL the search returned. Star the good ones, hide the bad ones.

Videos & guides

Quick crib sheet for the basics:

Pick research phrases like a target site would

Avoid SEO keywords like "best dentist near me". Think about what the target site writes about: tooth pain remedies, kid's dental anxiety, oral surgery recovery. Phrases that read like blog post topics or article subjects work much better than commercial keywords.

Start with depth 20, increase if you need more

Depth is how many results we pull per query. The default 20 catches the strongest signals without burning your search quota. Bump to 50 or 100 if your phrases are highly competitive and the first page is dominated by big publishers you can't outreach to.

Two-tier exclusions

Global exclusions apply to every report you ever run — perfect for wikipedia, pinterest, facebook, amazon, etc. Campaign exclusions apply only to one campaign — great for excluding competitors specific to that niche. Both are checked by default on every new report.

Custom is for power users

The 16 named report types wrap your phrases in proven footprints. Custom passes phrases through unchanged — write your own footprints, paste in fully-formed Google queries, and Authority Extractor just dedupes and tracks them.

FAQs

Why doesn't my report finish?

Reports run in batches via AJAX polling. If you close the browser, the report pauses. Reopen the report page and polling resumes from where it left off. If results never come, check your search-provider credentials in Settings.

Which search provider should I use?

• SerpAPI — easiest, paid. Most reliable for high-depth queries.
• Serper.dev — cheapest, fast. Great for production-scale prospecting.
• Google Custom Search — free tier (100 queries/day). Fine for kicking the tires.

Can I schedule reports to re-run?

The Report Update Frequency dropdown is stored on each report (weekly / biweekly / monthly), but the actual cron-driven re-run is not yet implemented in v3 of the self-hosted build. The dropdown is reserved for v4.

Are my prospects shared between campaigns?

No. Prospects belong to a single report inside a single campaign. The dedup check is per-report — running similar reports across campaigns may surface the same URLs, but they live independently.

What's the difference between Region and TLD?

Region picks which Google index to query (google.co.uk vs google.com). TLD appends site:.edu (or similar) to restrict result domains. They're independent — you can query the UK index for .edu results if you want.