Product Updates

Prospect Score Now Includes Real Publication Traffic

The Prospect Score now factors in SimilarWeb monthly traffic, so journalists at high-reach publications rank where they should — and you can see exactly how much audience is behind every pitch.

Dan Bruce
July 10, 2026
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Product Updates

PressReacher

Prospect Score Now Includes Real Publication Traffic

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Domain authority tells you half the story

Until now, the Prospect Score judged a publication's weight using domain authority — Ahrefs DR, with Moz DA as a fallback. That's a solid signal for how well a site performs in search, but it's not the same thing as readership. A niche trade site can have a respectable DR and a few thousand visitors a month. A regional news site can have a modest DR and half a million.

If you're deciding who to pitch, that difference matters. So we've added a second signal: real monthly traffic from SimilarWeb.

What changed

The Prospect Score now includes an Audience Reach factor worth up to 20 points, based on the publication's monthly visits:

  • 5M+ visits/month — 20 points
  • 1M+ — 16 points
  • 500K+ — 12 points
  • 100K+ — 8 points
  • 10K+ — 4 points

The rest of the score has been rebalanced around it. Publication authority (Ahrefs DR or Moz DA) is worth up to 30 points, having a verified email on file is worth up to 30, topic expertise up to 10, and writing for multiple outlets up to 5 — with a relevance bonus of up to 20 points when a journalist matches your active search filters.

Where you'll see it

Everywhere the Prospect Score appears — journalist cards, the stats view, and the full profile. Hover over any score and the breakdown tooltip now shows the Audience Reach line with the publication's actual traffic figure next to it, like "2.4M visits/mo". No guessing where the number came from.

Sorting and filtering by Prospect Score in the PR Database uses the updated algorithm too, so your ranked shortlists reflect real-world reach straight away.

Why this makes your shortlist better

Two journalists can look identical on paper — same beat, verified emails, similar publications by authority. But if one of them writes for a site with 40x the readership, that's the pitch with more upside. The updated score surfaces that difference automatically, so the journalists at the top of your list are the ones whose coverage actually travels.

Traffic data comes from SimilarWeb and is refreshed regularly for publications across the database. You'll also find the same traffic figures on publication profiles if you want to dig deeper before pitching.

To see it in action: Open the PR Database → sort by Prospect Score → hover any score to see the new Audience Reach factor in the breakdown.