What brands look for when they vet a UGC creator

The order a brand works in, first filter to final list

Nobody assesses creators one at a time from the top. A campaign starts with too many candidates and a deadline, so the work is elimination, and the cheap eliminations happen first.

1. Describe the brief in a sentenceA British dog owner who films unboxings, for a tracker launch in March. Everything downstream is scored against that sentence, not against an idea of quality.
2. Cut on category and countryThese filters remove the most rows for the least effort, so they run first. A profile that states neither is gone at this step, before a human has looked at anything.
3. Check the tier, not the exact numberWe keep follower bands rather than precise counts, because a precise count is wrong a fortnight after it was collected. A brief asking for under 5,000 is asking for a band it budgeted, so an account sitting just over the line is not negotiable by argument.
4. Open the most recent twenty postsThe first human step, and it lasts seconds. They want the product type in your own hands, in your own space, appearing more than once.
5. Verify the addressAn email that bounces is a dead row, so contacts get tested before outreach rather than after a week of silence. A typo in your bio can end a booking you never knew existed.
6. Dedupe, then cut to the funded slotsOne person across two platforms is one person, so duplicate handles collapse into a single row. Then the list is cut to the number of creators the budget actually pays for, which is usually smaller than the shortlist.

Just 32.1% of indexed creators publish a link of any kind, which is why that row separates two otherwise level profiles more often than its size suggests.

The one check a profile clears to enter our file at all

A single question decides it: is there anything visible on this account showing it has made content for a company, as opposed to merely owning an audience. Size is not the test and never has been. A meme page with three hundred thousand followers does not clear it. An account with nine hundred followers, three labelled paid posts, a rate line in the bio and a link to finished work clears it comfortably.

During the most recent rebuild, 1,598 candidate profiles failed to clear that question and never reached the 24,032 rows that survived it. They were not turned away for being small. They were turned away because nothing on them said a company had ever paid or gifted them, and a marketer reading the same page would have drawn the same blank.

That is the most useful paragraph on this page, because the check is not some proprietary insight. It is a machine approximating what a coordinator does in four seconds, hunting for the same three things a person hunts for: work that is labelled as paid, a route to contact you, and one sentence saying what you make. No fee moves it, there is nothing to submit, and the way to change your position is to change the account.

Five details that quietly remove you from a shortlist

None of these come back to you as feedback. They are read, they decide, and you hear nothing.

• Nothing categorical in the bio47.9% of our rows end up with no category attached, because the profile's own text never named one. Two concrete nouns is the entire repair.
• No route to reach youNo address, DMs closed, dead link. Somebody holding forty names will not hunt for a forty-first way to contact one of them.
• A grid of other people's finished adsReposted brand assets prove you can repost. They do not prove a camera was ever in your hand, and a buyer needs the second thing.
• Paid work with nothing marking itAn unlabelled partnership reads either as inexperience or as a compliance liability. Both cost the slot, and the second one costs it permanently.
• A category that changes every weekSerum, then a hotel suite, then a protein bar, then press-on nails. At the shortlist stage, legible beats versatile every single time.

What a fit score measures, and which inputs you can move

A fit score is not a quality rating, and reading it as one sends people badly astray. It measures distance between the sentence a brand typed and what your account says about itself, and it is blunt deliberately. The number climbs when the brief's own words are already present in your text: the product category, the platform, the country, the format, the band.

Three inputs are fixed on any given brief. The category wanted, the country they can ship to, and the tier they budgeted. Arguing with those burns a week. What you can move is the gap between stated and implied, because nothing in a pipeline like this infers anything on your behalf. An account that says it films cat food unboxings scores. An account whose last nine posts are cat food unboxings, under a bio about good vibes and oat milk, does not.

Two fields do not exist in a file like ours at all: engagement rate and a real paid rate. Neither is stored, so neither can enter a score computed from it, and anything claiming to know your engagement from a source like this got it somewhere else. When a brand wants that figure it asks you directly, and the honest answer is a screenshot of your own insights.

The reliability check nobody warns creators about

After the creative pass comes a quieter one, and it decides repeat work. Two questions get asked about you that your camera cannot answer: does this person reply, and did they hand over what the brief asked for. On a first collaboration nobody can be asked, so a proxy runs instead: how quickly did you answer, did you answer the actual question, and did your figure arrive in writing or in a voice note.

Past a token fee, expect a reference request. It is usually one line to a marketing coordinator somewhere else: did she deliver on time, and did you have to chase the files. Creators are rarely told this happens, and it is why the unglamorous habits buy more work than a better hook does. Naming files properly. Hitting the date you named. Sending raw footage in the format requested rather than the format convenient to you.

The other half is the paper trail. A company that got burned once checks whether you sign things. An invoice carrying your legal name, a licence term agreed in writing before filming, and a delivery folder with a date on it are the three artefacts that make a second booking easy for somebody to approve internally.