CTD scores your relationship with every person in your network on a scale that reflects how real and how recent the connection is. Here's exactly how it's built.

It starts with email — but only two-way

The foundation is your email activity. But not all email counts equally. If someone emailed you 100 times and you never replied, that's a zero. Mass group threads don't count either — you and the other person have to have emailed each other directly. Once you have genuine two-way exchanges, the score rises with volume and recency: more messages, more recently sent, means a higher score.

LinkedIn adds signal — if there's history behind it

Upload your LinkedIn data and CTD layers it in. A LinkedIn connection on its own scores as weak by default — being connected doesn't mean you actually know someone. Two-way LinkedIn messages, or a LinkedIn connection backed by real email history, bumps the score up meaningfully. The data sources reinforce each other.

Public data fills in the gaps

This is where CTD goes further than any contact list can. Using public data, CTD surfaces relationships you'd otherwise miss entirely. If you and someone never emailed and aren't even connected on LinkedIn, but you worked at the same company at the same time in similar roles — say, both VPs in the same org — CTD predicts you know each other.

These predicted relationships open up warm paths that wouldn't exist without this layer. And they require zero extra effort from you.

To get the most accurate scores: connect your email account and upload your LinkedIn connections and messages. Each source you add gives CTD more signal to work with.

What the score means in practice

CTD translates the raw score into four levels you'll see throughout the product:

  • StrongReal, recent and/or frequent two-way history. An intro request through this person is likely to land.
  • FamiliarSome two-way history, or a LinkedIn connection with real message history. Worth reaching out to.
  • WeakA LinkedIn-only connection, or a low number of emails exchanged in both directions. Still better than cold outreach.
  • Unknown (0 bars)No signal in either direction. Single-direction contact — someone emailed you but you never replied — doesn't qualify as weak. It scores as unknown.

When CTD shows you a warm path to someone, it picks the connector with the strongest score — not just whoever happens to know them.