Outreach
Citations shows you where you're missing. Outreach is what happens next: every gap that's worth pursuing turned into a working queue, ranked so the highest-leverage targets surface first and the long tail of low-fit, high-effort domains stays out of your way.
This is the place to live once your citation reading is sharp and you're ready to actually move the numbers.
How an opportunity gets scored
Every gap surfaced in Citations is a potential opportunity. Trakkr scores it on two dimensions and uses both to decide what gets your attention.
| Dimension | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Fit (0-100) | How closely the source matches your brand: relevance to your tracked prompts, source-type weight, whether competitors are already cited there, alignment with your positioning |
| Difficulty (Low / Medium / High) | How hard this kind of source typically is to land coverage on. Reviews and roundup posts skew easier; long-form editorial and institutional sources skew harder |
Cross those two and you get four buckets. The names are the strategy:
| High fit | Low fit | |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | Quick Wins. Start here. High leverage, short cycle. | Low priority. Easy but the payoff is small. Skip unless you're idle. |
| Hard | Worth it. The big landings. Plan for multi-touch over weeks, not days. | Skip. Low payoff, high effort. Move on. |
Filter the queue by quadrant from the intelligence panel. For almost every brand, Quick Wins is the right default starting point. Worth it is where the compounding wins live but you have to build them into the calendar.
Reading the queue
Each row in the list is one opportunity:
- Domain with favicon and source-type badge (earned media, review, social, institution, and so on)
- Difficulty (Low / Medium / High)
- Competitors winning: how many of your tracked competitors are already cited on this domain
- Fit score: the 0-100 leverage rating, shown as a bar so you can scan
- Status: Not contacted, Contacted, Won, or Hidden
Sort by Priority (Trakkr's blend of fit and momentum), Fit alone, Domain, or Recent. Priority is the right default; switch to Fit when you want to weight purely by leverage and ignore recency signals.
Click any row to open the opportunity profile in the right pane.
What's in an opportunity profile
This is where outreach becomes specific instead of generic.
Pitch angle. A short, pre-generated hook tailored to this exact source. Trakkr reads what the domain already publishes, looks at how it covers your competitors, and proposes a value prop or angle that would fit. It's a starting point, not a template, but it skips the blank-page problem.
Why it's a gap. The competitors already cited on this domain, the specific pages on the domain AI is drawing from, and the prompts in your tracked list that surfaced those pages. This is what you reference in the pitch: you're not just saying "please cover us," you're saying "here's the page where Adidas, New Balance, and Hoka appear, and here's why we belong in it."
Status and notes. Move the opportunity through the workflow as you go:
- Not contacted: the default
- Contacted: log the touch when you reach out
- Won: they cited you (verify in Feed within a scan or two)
- Hidden: out of scope, not pursuing, get it out of the list
Notes are shared across the team, so a teammate can pick up your thread without re-doing the research. Drop in the contact, the conversation, the date you followed up.
Working the queue
Different goals call for different filters. The three patterns most teams settle into:
Maximum momentum. Filter to Quick Wins, sort by Fit. Take the top five to ten in a single sprint. Done well, this fills the Feed with new citations inside a few weeks and gives the team a visible run rate.
Compound authority. Filter to Worth It and accept these will take two to three months each. The payoffs are bigger, the cycle is longer, the relationship matters more. Treat each one like a small editorial campaign, not a cold pitch.
Defensive coverage. Open Citations → Sources → filter to domains where you're cited but only one competitor is. Protect what you have before chasing new ground. A lost citation on a high-authority source costs more than a new one on a medium-authority one earns.
How to actually pitch
Trakkr surfaces the targets and the angle. The pitch itself is on you, and the principles are unchanged from old-school PR:
- Reference the specific page. The page-level URL is in the profile. Mention it. "I saw the Wirecutter guide cites Brooks and Hoka but not us, here's why I think we'd round it out" lands. "Please consider us for inclusion" doesn't.
- Lead with something they don't have. A data point, an exclusive quote, an angle on the topic they haven't covered. Inclusion is a favor; a story is a trade.
- Use the generated angle as a starting point, not the final word. Trakkr builds the angle from what's already on the page. You know your brand better than the model does, sharpen it before you send.
- Follow up once, then stop. Editors notice the over-eager and remember. One follow-up after a week, then move on and try the next one in your queue.
Measuring whether outreach is working
A few numbers worth watching, in order of how soon they'll move:
| Metric | What healthy looks like |
|---|---|
| Response rate to first touch | 15-25% on cold outreach is normal |
| Inclusion rate (won / responded) | 30-50% of replies should result in some form of coverage |
| Time to citation appearing in Feed | Two to four weeks once you've landed it, sometimes faster on Perplexity |
| Gaps count on the Sources tab | Should trend down over a quarter, not week-to-week |
The single best feedback loop: after a successful outreach, watch the Feed. The new citation should show up as a "New" event within a scan or two. If it doesn't, the article landed but didn't make it into the AI's source set, usually because the link is buried, the page isn't well-indexed, or you weren't named in the relevant section. Worth diagnosing on a real example before you scale the next wave.
Common questions
My queue is empty. Why?
Outreach pulls from gaps surfaced in Citations. If you've just started, you need at least one citation report to land before opportunities are generated, which takes a day after your first prompt run. Empty after that usually means narrow prompts or a young brand: widen your tracked prompts in Research and the queue fills out.
Can I add an opportunity by hand?
Not directly. The queue is built from real gaps Trakkr observes in your citation data, by design; it stops you chasing domains nobody is reading. If you have a domain in mind that isn't in the list, check Citations → Sources first; if AI isn't citing anything on that domain across your category, the leverage is probably lower than you think.
What happens when I mark something Won?
The status moves to Won and the opportunity drops out of the active queue. The actual citation only appears in the Feed once AI picks it up, which is the real proof, not the status. So Won is "I think I landed this," and the Feed event is "yes you did."
How is fit different from priority?
Fit is pure leverage: how much would this citation move the needle if you won it. Priority is fit blended with practical factors: competitor pressure on the domain, recency, momentum signals. Sort by Fit when you want to ignore the noise and just see leverage. Sort by Priority when you want Trakkr's best guess at "what to do next."
Should I work this myself or hire someone?
Both work. The pitch angle and the page-level evidence are designed so a PR contractor can run the outreach without needing to learn your category from scratch; pass them the Outreach view and the brand profile and you've removed most of the briefing time. Teams that bring this in-house usually do it because the relationships compound, and the second pitch to the same editor is much easier than the first.