What we check, and what we never do.
ScoutedLead says things to business owners about their own websites, so the rules about what we check, what we keep and what we refuse to do matter as much as the leads.
Agencies and web studios: start with a free pilot of up to 25 scouted leads. Software companies: we set up a pipeline for your product.
Prefer to talk? Call or text (616) 585-0206. Leave a voicemail or send a text and Aaron gets back to you.
What we check
We load a business’s own website in a headless Chrome browser, on desktop and as an iPhone, the way a visitor would see it. We follow the booking, registration, payment and contact pages it links to, and nothing else.
Every fact is recorded as yes, no or unsure, with the page it came from and the date. We keep screenshots of what the browser showed, so a customer’s team can see why a lead was picked, and so can a business owner who asks. A reason to reach out is only used when the answer is definite. Unsure is never pitched.
Before a playbook sends anything, it is tested against businesses checked by hand. How it works explains the checks in more detail.
What we never do
- No Google ratings, reviews or opening hours. We don’t collect them, store them or put them in a lead or a preview.
- No guessed contact details. We use the phone and email a business publishes on its own website, and leave a field empty when it doesn’t.
- No cold text messages, and we don’t send email on a customer’s behalf. A person on their team reviews and sends.
- No Canada or California, for now. We don’t search for businesses there, and leads that turn out to be there are dropped before delivery, along with what we read about them.
- No promises we can’t measure, such as reply rates.
Opt-outs apply to every customer
A business that asks not to be contacted goes on one do-not-contact list that every ScoutedLead customer’s runs check. It isn’t one customer’s suppression list: once a business opts out through us, none of our customers will get it as a lead again.
To opt out, send the form and choose “A business asking not to be contacted”, with your website. A customer whose prospect asks them to stop reports it to us, and that business goes on the same list. The page for businesses explains what we keep and how to ask.
Previews
Some playbooks offer a business a private preview, such as a booking page with its name, showing what a fix could look like. Previews live on addresses under preview.scoutedlead.com. Each one is marked as a preview and as not affiliated with the business, is hidden from search engines with noindex, and is removed after 30 days.
A business that opts out has its previews taken down. A preview link is only sent when the owner says they want to see it.
Our crawler and robots.txt
ScoutedLead identifies itself with this user agent on every request, for every customer:
ScoutedLead/1.0 (+https://scoutedlead.com/opt-out/)
We crawl under our own name, never under a customer’s. We read robots.txt first, skip any site that asks us not to visit, and keep requests to a few pages per business with pauses between them. To block us, add this to your site’s robots.txt:
User-agent: ScoutedLead
Disallow: /
While 45Squared’s own prospecting moves onto ScoutedLead, some checks still run under its older name, AXIOM-Research. Add the same two lines with that name to block both.
Common questions
Do you use AI to decide what to say about a business?
A language model helps read a page, for example to tell an independent business from a chain or a directory, and to draft first messages. A name, city or owner it reads is kept only when the page itself prints it. The reasons to reach out come from what the browser loaded, recorded as yes, no or unsure, and a person on the customer’s side reviews every message before it goes out.
What if something you said about my business is wrong?
Tell us through the form, or reply to the email you got. We correct the lead, and the case becomes a test that every playbook has to pass from then on. If you’d rather not hear from anyone using ScoutedLead, choose “A business asking not to be contacted” on the form and we add you to the do-not-contact list.