If you find publications for outreach, you need candidates that fit what your business can contribute. The Prospect Index holds more than 10 million pages collected from the wider web, and takes in about 10 million strong new ones a month. The filters favor useful opportunities over a bigger raw number. Search it by phrase, by page type, or by describing what you are looking for.
Searching by words, and by meaning
Opportunity Types takes the placement you want and combines it with your campaign's market terms. Use it when you already know you are after contribution pages, directories, sponsorships, podcasts or awards.
Advanced Search hands you the title, body and similarity controls directly, for the questions the fixed report does not answer.
Meaning search matters more here than anywhere else in the product. A resource page about your subject that never once uses your terminology still comes back, because the comparison is on meaning and not on matching words.
What a competitor gap report can never show you
A backlink gap report can only find placements your competitors already have. If nobody in your market has been on a relevant podcast, joined an association or been listed in a new directory, no gap analysis will ever put it in front of you.
Searching by opportunity type has no such limit. It answers where you could appear. The gap report answers where competitors already did. You want both.
Every result set is a shortlist
A similarity search reads up to 250 candidate documents and returns 25 rows once they are grouped.
So an empty result is not evidence that nothing exists out there. And narrowing your query changes which 250 documents get read at all, which makes a specific search a different search and not a filtered version of a broad one. When something you expected is missing, describe it another way.
Tell a policy page from an article
A contribution policy and a published guest article both match the same subject, and only one of them tells you how to submit.
Open Details, read the text, and work out which you have. Adding a published article to an outreach list because the topic matched is the most common wasted step in prospect research.
Dates behave differently here
Prospect pages often carry no publication date at all, so the index holds useful older resources that a date-sorted view would drop. That is deliberate. A resource page from 2019 that somebody still maintains is worth exactly as much as one from last week.
Indexed time tells you when the page was collected, not when it was written. A page that looks newly found may have been up for years.
The stored outbound links
The index stores each page's outbound links. Brand Link Gap and Brand Unlinked Mentions use them to test whether a page links to you. A search-result snippet cannot answer that question, so both reports run against the indexes and never against search results.
Qualify before you contact anyone
The index gives you candidates. The live page gives you the decision.
Check eligibility, deadlines, fees and submission instructions on the current page before you write anything. A directory listing three of your competitors is usually telling you all three paid to join. Someone with a budget decides that one, not you.
When a search produces a suitable page, check its current submission requirements. Record how your proposed contribution would meet them before preparing an approach.
See how to evaluate a prospect, counting new matches daily, or prioritizing the remaining prospects.