A full-web run can surface tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of qualifying publishers in a vertical — far more than any outreach team can work at once. We tier them by reproducible traffic proxies — Chrome UX Report presence and public rank groups (top 100K / 500K / 1M) — so you sequence the highest-reach partners first. We never invent visitor numbers.
Every publisher on your list clears the ICP — that's the point of screening. But a team that can run 200 outreach threads a week needs an order of operations. Tiering on reach turns a flat list of thousands into a prioritized queue.
Bigger publishers move more volume per partnership. We rank them using signals anyone can reproduce — not a black-box "traffic score" you'd have to take on faith.
Reps work Tier A first for headline reach, then Tiers B and C for the long-tail volume that competitors never bother to mine.
Every tier maps to a public, checkable data source. When a stakeholder asks "how do you know," you point at the proxy — not a made-up monthly-visitors figure.
We deliberately use only proxies that a third party could re-derive. Both are directional indicators of reach, not exact audience counts, and we label them as such.
Whether a domain appears in the public Chrome UX Report dataset. Inclusion requires a site to have sufficient real-user Chrome traffic, so presence is a meaningful floor on reach — and its absence tells you a site is smaller or newer.
Which coarse rank bucket a domain falls into on a public popularity ranking — top 100K, top 500K, top 1M, or beyond. We use the group, never a spurious exact position, because the buckets are what the data can honestly support.
Each qualified publisher lands in exactly one tier. Tiers are a prioritization aid, not a quality judgment — a Tier D niche site can convert better than a Tier A generalist for the right advertiser.
In CrUX and inside the top 100K rank group. Your highest-reach partners — often worth a personal, senior outreach touch.
In CrUX, rank group 100K–500K. Substantial mid-market publishers — the workhorse of most affiliate programs.
In CrUX, rank group 500K–1M. Growing niche sites — efficient to recruit at scale with templated sequences.
Not in CrUX or below the top-1M group. Smaller and newer — high uncontested volume, best worked with automation.
The tier distribution below is drawn from real screening runs. Because the publishers are independent sites, we follow standard confidentiality practice on public pages: domains are withheld and figures generalized, so nothing here is traceable to specific sites — including through a web search. That protects the publishers without changing the underlying data. Your pilot and client deliverables carry the actual domains with each proxy value, so every tier assignment can be verified directly.
An illustrative distribution for a vertical whose full run yielded roughly 60,000 qualified publishers. The shape — a small head, a broad tail — is typical; the exact split is a labeled estimate, and your own numbers come from your real run.
| Tier | Proxy definition | Share of the qualified list (estimate) | Outreach play |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier A — Top 100K | CrUX + rank group ≤100K | ~2% · ~1,200 publishers | Named, senior, one-to-one |
| Tier B — Top 500K | CrUX + rank group 100K–500K | ~11% · ~6,600 publishers | Personalized, prioritized queue |
| Tier C — Top 1M | CrUX + rank group 500K–1M | ~22% · ~13,200 publishers | Templated sequences at scale |
| Tier D — Long tail | No CrUX / below top 1M | ~65% · ~39,000 publishers | Automated, high-volume nurture |
Segmentation is only useful if it's trustworthy. Both proxies are public and checkable, so a tier is an auditable claim — not a number your team has to defend on faith.
Reference engagement (a large-scale production run on our own classification platform): a 30M dataset → 1.73M travel-related domains → 1.2M ICP-screened → ~96% precision on a reviewed sample. Tier figures on this page are estimates shown for illustration.
Segmentation ships inside the same deduplicated CSV as the rest of the screen — sortable, filterable, and ready to drive outreach priority in your CRM.
| Column | Example value | What it does for you |
|---|---|---|
crux_present | true / false | The reach floor — is the site in the public CrUX dataset |
rank_group | top_500k | Coarse public popularity bucket — never a fake exact rank |
traffic_tier | B | The single A–D label your reps sort and sequence on |
proxy_source | CrUX + public ranking | The auditable origin of the tier, for stakeholder defense |
is_icp + confidence | fit · 0.9 | Tiering only ever ranks publishers that already qualify |
The free pilot runs the full pipeline on your vertical, tiers the results by reproducible traffic proxies, and delivers your first 20 qualified publishers plus a full-run projection. No cost, no obligation.
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