Outreach Clerk

Built a link building tool that rejects 42% of domains before sending a single email — here's why we designed it that way.

Background: I've been in SEO since 2015. Been building Outreach Clerk as an AI-powered link building platform for a few years now.

The number one support issue we kept seeing was campaigns quietly destroying sender reputation. Bounce rates creeping up. Emails sliding into spam. Clients upset about campaign results without understanding why.

The root cause was almost always the same thing — outreach tools that blast everything and leave quality control entirely to the user. Users don't do it consistently. Then their domain gets flagged.

So we rebuilt the pipeline from scratch around one hard rule: filter before you send.

Here's the full 11-step flow we shipped:

1. Upload prospect list from Google Sheets

2. Set campaign criteria — DA/DR thresholds, spam score limits, target countries, timezone, send window

3. Auto blacklist check

4. Red-flag content scan using 120+ Google search operators (adult content, drug sites, paid-link farms, write-for-us pages, sponsored post footprints)

5. Moz DA + spam score filter

6. Ahrefs DR + total traffic + top traffic country check

7. Geo exclusion based on top traffic country

8. Auto lead generation by visiting each qualifying domain

9. Real-time email verification — SMTP ping + syntax check before any send

10. AI personalizes your saved template using scraped site category, content type, and business type

11. Sends from your own SMTP → writes Status + Sending Date + Skipped Reason back to your Google Sheet

Real numbers from a test campaign:

— 5,000 domains uploaded

— 1,240 failed quality filters (blacklist, red-flag, Moz/Ahrefs)

— 850 had no verifiable leads

— 2,910 emails actually sent

The 42% rejection rate is the feature.

We made it BYOSMTP — your domain reputation stays yours. We also made it BYOA (bring your own Ahrefs + Moz keys). And if you don't connect them, the pipeline skips those checks and runs the rest normally. No hard dependency.

One honest thing I'd do differently: the campaign criteria setup could surface smarter defaults and threshold recommendations for new users who don't know what DA or DR floor to set. That's on the roadmap.

If you're building in the SEO or outreach automation space — would love to hear what filtering logic has worked best for you.

Full breakdown in the comments 👇