Two people can run Corda on the same day and walk away with completely different recommendations. That’s how we built Corda.
Corda builds every recommendation around what you actually give it. I am talking about information like your website, goal, competitors, and choices you make along the way.
Remember, specific input will result in sharper results.
In this guide, we will look at what really shapes a Corda recommendation. So before you assume something’s off, you know what to check first.
What Goes Into A Recommendation
Corda isn’t pulling from some fixed list somewhere. Every recommendation, whether it’s a gap worth prioritizing or a publisher worth pursuing, comes down to four things:
| Input | What it tells Corda |
| Your website and Target Page | What you’re actually trying to support, and where things stand right now (your Baseline) |
| Your Authority Goal | What “better” is supposed to mean for this particular page |
| Your competitors | What a real, relevant advantage looks like in your market |
| Your past choices | The kind of fit you actually care about |
If you change any one of these, the recommendation shifts with it. That’s expected and in fact it’s also the main thing you can actually control.
Pick A Target Page That Matters
A website can be strong overall and still have one weak page dragging behind it. That’s exactly why Corda asks you to choose a Target Page.
It narrows the analysis down to something specific instead of trying to summarize your entire site.
If you pick a page you’re not really invested in, Corda has little to measure against, and the recommendations come back feeling generic. And that makes sense, because the question you asked was generic too.
Choose a page tied to something you actually want to move. And try to keep the same page through a full campaign so the analysis doesn’t lose the thread.
Don’t Ask For Three Goals At Once
First, set an Authority Goal. After that, Corda compares your current position against that. Usually the goal that we focus on is: “Become more trusted for this topic”
However, Corda sets a 360° goal. Therefore, with Corda, your goal will be:
- Become more trusted
- Get more traffic
- Beat this specific competitor
And now Corda has to guess which one you actually care about most.
Set one goal per campaign. If you’re juggling more than one, that’s usually a sign you need a second campaign, not a bigger one.
Actually Check The Competitor List
Competitor Analysis looks for the pattern behind why someone’s ahead of you. Not just the fact that they are.
Corda picks competitors based on shared product, audience, topic, and market. But it’s worth confirming the list yourself before trusting what it puts on the plate.
If a company on that list doesn’t really compete with you for the same page or audience, whatever gap Corda points out probably won’t apply to your business.
Honestly, this is why some recommendations are irrelevant or inappropriate.
Review the list. Swap out anything that doesn’t belong. And remember you can run different competitor sets for different campaigns. At Corda, nothing says you’re locked into one.
Read Why Before You Look At The Number
Every publisher Corda recommends comes with a reason attached. That said, the main factors are why it fits your page, topic, audience, and the gap you’re working on.
Metrics like DA, DR, and traffic show up too, but they only offer context, not the justification you need.
It’s easy to just sort by the biggest number. But a publisher with a high metric and a weak fit is usually a worse pick than one with a modest metric and a real connection to your topic. That’s exactly why fit, not score, drives the ranking.
Open a few of the reasons before approving anything. If a reason doesn’t apply to your business, exclude it.
Your Choices Train The System
You can select, exclude, or replace any publisher Corda suggests, and adjust criteria or budget whenever you want. This isn’t just there for show.
Every exclusion, every approval, narrows down what “good fit” actually means for your business specifically.
So don’t rubber-stamp every suggestion, and don’t reject everything on instinct either. Evaluate each decision like it actually matters.
Link Every Campaign With A Goal
A common way recommendations get watered down is asking one campaign to fix everything at once. Corda works best when a campaign has a single, clear purpose. If you’re trying to address two different kinds of gaps, that’s probably two campaigns, not one oversized one.
Before you build anything, ask what job this specific campaign needs to do. Not how many things you can cram into it.
Recommendations Aren’t Static
What Corda recommends reflects your website, your goal, and your competitors at the moment you ran the analysis.
If your goal shifts, or a competitor changes direction, the recommendations that made sense last month might not be the sharpest option anymore.
It’s worth revisiting your inputs now and then, especially before a new campaign, rather than assuming an old analysis still holds.
The Short Version
Better inputs lead to better analysis, which leads to recommendations you can actually explain and act on. That’s the same loop running through all of Corda.
The platform works in this order: analyze, understand, prioritize, act, measure, and finally reassess. The recommendations aren’t a fixed output sitting there waiting for you.
In simpler terms, they reflect how clearly you’ve defined what you’re actually trying to do.
One more thing to keep in mind: Corda identifies the authority gaps tied to your search objective and recommends actions to address them.
It doesn’t promise rankings, traffic, backlinks, placements, or AI citations.
