How Finder finds websites

A scan is Finder searching for people who already write about products like yours. This page covers the website half: blogs, review sites and newsletters with a site. YouTube has its own scan and shows up in the same list.

What a scan searches for

You gave Finder two lists when you set up your brand: your competitors and your keywords. A scan turns them into Google searches, in your brand's country and language:

• Each keyword, as you wrote it.
• For each competitor, three searches: "Name review", "Name alternatives" and "Name vs".

Let's say you listed five competitors and ten keywords: Finder makes 25 searches, keeps the top 20 results from each, treats every site that ranks as a candidate, and keeps the pages that ranked as its evidence.

Your first scan starts as soon as you've saved your competitors and keywords, so you can write your offer while it runs. Website and YouTube searches run at the same time. Neither waits. A finished source can add its results while another source is still working.

A scan has a hard five-minute boundary, measured from the moment Finder accepts it. Provider work stops after 270 seconds. The final 30 seconds are reserved for saving the result and marking the scan done or failed. A slow source cannot keep the scan open or write results after its timeout. If one source finishes and another times out, Finder keeps the finished results and shows a warning for the source that stopped.

One site, one row

A site is identified by its domain. www.example.com, blog.example.com and example.com/reviews are all example.com, because one company with one inbox owns them.

There's one exception. Some hosts rent a subdomain to anyone, like Substack or GitHub Pages. There, jane.substack.com and joe.substack.com are two different people, so each gets its own row.

When next week's scan finds the same site again, its row is updated with the new pages. You never get a duplicate. Anything you did to the row stays: saved, hidden, notes, the stage it's in. A page that hasn't ranked for 30 days drops off the row.

What gets left out

Most sites a scan finds aren't people you'd email. So Finder sorts them before you see the list, and it tells you what it did with each one, because a tool that quietly drops results is a tool you can't check.

Never listed at all:

• Your own site, and the competitors you named.
• Anyone who's already a partner in your AffiliateRail program, and anyone in a list you uploaded.
• Big platforms that rank for everything: social networks, app stores, software marketplaces, national news sites.

Listed, but hidden. These are written to your account with the reason. You can see them under Hidden and bring any of them back:

Why hide vendors? We ran three test scans on real brands before building this, and 30 of the 40 top-ranked websites sold software in the same category. They rank because they write comparison pages about each other. Hide them, and the reviewers you want move up.

Finder makes the vendor call in two ways. First it reads the evidence: a site that compares itself to a rival ("Acme vs Rival" on acme.com) is a vendor. Then an AI model reads the domain and the page titles and says who owns the site. The AI only sorts. It never writes a number, a rate or a claim about a person. If a call is wrong, bring the row back from Hidden and it stays back.

Coupon and deals sites are not hidden. They stay in the list with a low score.

The two numbers on a website row

If the estimate isn't available, the band says unknown. Finder doesn't guess. A provider's estimate for today does not prove three months of history, country shares or keyword volumes, so those sections stay empty unless the provider supplied them. The drawer names the source and the date of the estimate.

Each page on the row has a type: review, comparison, alternatives, listicle, guide or landing page. A listicle is a ranked list like "7 best screen recorders". A landing page is a company's own product or pricing page.

You'll sometimes see a chip like "30% recurring" or "affiliate link". That's what the page itself says about what its author already promotes. Finder reads it from the search result. It doesn't visit the page, and it doesn't infer anything.

When the next scan runs

Finder scans your brand again seven days after your last full scan, at the first 04:30 UTC on or after that day. The header on Discover counts down to it. Rows found by the latest scan carry a NEW chip.

If your trial has ended, the weekly scan doesn't run. Everything you've found stays where it is.

When a scan can't run

A scan that can't start, or fails part-way, tells you why in one sentence:

• Nothing to search for. Add at least one competitor or keyword.
• Plan can't scan. Your trial ended, or your plan lapsed. Pick a plan to scan again.
• Research budget used. Finder caps what it spends on outside data for each trial. If a scan reaches the cap it stops cleanly, keeps what it found, and says so.
• Provider calls are off. We switched them off on our side. Nothing was charged. Try again later.

A search that cost you a search credit and then failed gives the credit back on its own, and the message says so.

What we keep

Your rows, scores and evidence stay for as long as your account does. Normalized traffic facts and the site's about text stay with the row too. The raw data a provider sent us is deleted after 90 days, but removing that raw payload does not change a later score.