Opportunities
Topics Scout set aside
Why some candidate topics never reach the judge, how to see which ones, and what to do if one of them is yours.
Before Scout judges a topic for fit, it asks a quicker question of every candidate it found: is this plainly not about your business? The ones that plainly are not, it sets aside. They are never scored, never flagged, and never take a place in the queue. This page explains why that step exists and how to check it.
Why it exists
The searches around a company's topics are wide. Expand "account sharing" and you get streaming device limits; expand "email verification" and you get webmail login pages; expand a product name and you get things that merely share a word with it. Those searches have huge volumes, and volume alone once filled a queue with two hundred topics that had nothing to do with the company that owned it. Every one was correctly flagged for poor fit, and the queue read as empty, while the topics that belonged, with a thousand searches a month, were never even looked at.
Setting aside the plainly off-market candidates first means the queue is chosen from what could be yours, not from what is most searched.
What gets set aside
Scout asks, for each candidate, whether your company would have a reason to publish an article on it for the people it sells to. It sets a topic aside only when the answer is a confident no: a consumer's errand, another company's brand or product, a general fact, a word that only resembles your vocabulary. Anything uncertain goes on to the full judgement. If Scout cannot reach an answer for a batch, it keeps the whole batch rather than guess.
Seeing what was set aside
After a scan, a line appears under the Opportunities heading: Scout set aside 2,670 topics that were not about your business before judging the rest. Expand it to see the most-searched examples and a note: "If one of these belongs to you, research it by name and Scout will judge it properly."
The examples are the highest-volume topics set aside, because those are the ones a person would most want to check.
If one of them is yours
Use Research a topic and give Scout the topic by name. A researched topic goes straight to the full judgement, is scored like any other, and appears in the queue or under Flagged with its reasons. If Scout keeps setting aside topics that are genuinely yours, the cause is usually a company profile that does not mention that part of your business; see Your company profile.