Discovery is the engine that fills your opportunity feed. It runs the first time automatically, right after onboarding, and it costs nothing: browsing what it finds is always free. Here is where it looks and how it decides what to surface.
Where opportunities come from
Serpfeed runs several engines in parallel and pools the results into one feed. Each opportunity carries a type so you can see at a glance why it showed up.
| Type | What it is |
|---|---|
| Competitor gap | Sites that link to your competitors but not yet to you. |
| Your backlinks | Your own live and recently dropped links, so you can win lost ones back. |
| Unlinked mentions | Pages that name your brand in text without linking to you. |
| Guest posts | Sites that invite “write for us” contributions. |
| Resource pages | “Best tools” and “resources” roundups that could list you. |
| Listicle gaps | “Best of” and “top 10” roundups that already rank in your niche and could add you to the list. |
| Alternatives | Pages listing alternatives to your competitors, where you have a natural case for being included. |
| Content pages | Blogs and guides that rank for your topics and could add a link to you as a resource. Shown for content-led niches, not local shops. |
| Directories | Places to submit your site, plus a curated catalog of quality ones. |
Start with the right keywords
Almost everything above runs off your keywords, so they are worth a minute of your attention. Open Keywords and look at Discovered. Serpfeed checks what your site genuinely ranks for today, plus the keywords your competitors rank for and you do not, and puts what it finds there. You do not have to ask it to.
Nothing it finds is used until you say so. Suggestions sit in Awaiting review, you keep the ones that match the business, and the ones you send to linkbuilding are what shape which opportunities Serpfeed hunts for. Anything you dismiss stays dismissed, so a later check will not keep proposing it.
Brand new site with no rankings yet? That is expected, and it is not a problem. Add the keywords you want to rank for as targets and discovery works from those instead.
How Serpfeed picks the lists worth chasing
Plenty of sites rank once for a “best” search without ever publishing lists again. Getting onto one of those is rarely worth the email, so Serpfeed judges a site two ways before recommending it.
First, does it keep coming back? Serpfeed runs a spread of “best”, “top” and “alternatives” searches across your keywords, and a site that appears in six of them is a very different prospect from one that appears in a single result. You can see this as Listicle appearances.
Second, is publishing lists actually what the site does? Serpfeed looks at everything the site ranks for and works out how much of it is comparison content. A site with modest traffic where most of its search terms are “best”, “top” and “versus” is a far better target than a huge site where those are a rounding error, because listing products like yours is its whole business. That percentage is the Listicle footprint.
Both are columns you can filter and sort on in the feed, and both feed into the Serpfeed Score. A site with a strong footprint still needs the authority to be worth having, so the footprint lifts a prospect rather than deciding it.
This is not just for products people shop for. “Best hospitals for cancer care”, “top fitness creators” and “best charities for clean water” are the same kind of page, and Serpfeed adjusts what it searches for to match your field. The one exception is a single-location local business, where these searches return a map rather than an article, so Serpfeed leans on directories and competitor links instead.
You don’t need competitors for it to work
Adding competitors makes discovery richer, but it is not required. Even a project with none still gets your own backlink import, unlinked mentions, guest-post, resource-page and content-page discovery from your keywords, and curated directories.
How often it runs
The first run happens automatically at the end of onboarding. After that you can refresh discovery from the Linkbuilding page, subject to a cooldown: once every 30 days on the free plan, and once every 7 days on paid plans. The cooldown keeps results fresh without re-scanning the same ground every day.
Discovery is always free