Understanding AI Scoring
How GovScout's AI relevance scoring works, what factors influence scores, and how to improve the quality of your matches.
Every contract opportunity in GovScout receives an AI relevance score when matched against your company profile or search query. This score helps you quickly prioritize which opportunities are worth pursuing and which ones you can skip.
How Scoring Works
GovScout's scoring engine evaluates each opportunity across multiple dimensions and produces a composite score from 0 to 100:
- 90-100 -- Excellent match. The opportunity closely aligns with your stated capabilities, NAICS codes, and certifications.
- 70-89 -- Strong match. Most factors align well, but there may be minor gaps in technology fit or scope.
- 50-69 -- Moderate match. The opportunity is in your general domain but may require capabilities you have not highlighted or may be a stretch in scale.
- Below 50 -- Weak match. The opportunity has some keyword overlap but is not well-aligned with your profile.
Scoring Factors
The AI considers several factors when calculating relevance:
Capability Alignment
The strongest weight goes to how well the opportunity description matches your company's capability description. The AI performs semantic comparison, meaning it understands that "network defense" and "cybersecurity monitoring" are related concepts even if the exact words differ.
Opportunities that describe work your company explicitly does will score highest. Opportunities that describe adjacent or partially overlapping work will score moderately.
NAICS Code Match
If the opportunity's NAICS code matches one of your registered codes, the score receives a boost. A primary NAICS code match is weighted more heavily than a secondary code match.
Set-Aside Eligibility
Opportunities with set-aside designations that match your certifications receive a score boost. For example, if you are 8(a) certified and an opportunity is set aside for 8(a) firms, the score increases because you have a competitive advantage.
Conversely, if an opportunity has a set-aside type you do not qualify for, the score is reduced since you would not be eligible to compete.
Contract Size and Scope
The AI evaluates whether the contract's estimated value and scope are appropriate for your business size. If your profile indicates you are a small business and the contract is a $500 million enterprise-wide initiative, the score will reflect the mismatch in scale.
Agency and Domain Fit
If your capability description mentions specific agencies or domains (e.g., "healthcare IT for VA" or "logistics for DoD"), opportunities from those agencies or in those domains receive a relevance boost.
Improving Your Scores
If your search results are returning low scores, here are steps to improve match quality:
Update Your Capability Description
The most impactful change you can make is improving your company's capability description. Add:
- Specific technologies and platforms you work with
- Types of agencies or departments you serve
- Certifications and clearance levels your team holds
- Scale of projects you typically handle (contract values, team sizes)
Add More NAICS Codes
Review your NAICS code selections. If competitors in your space use codes you have not registered, add them to your profile. Search for recently awarded contracts in your field to see which codes agencies are using.
Be Specific in Search Queries
Broad queries like "IT services" will return many results with moderate scores. Narrower queries that describe specific work produce fewer results but with higher relevance scores.
AI scoring works best when your company profile is detailed and your search queries are specific. Think of it as a two-sided match: the more information you provide about your capabilities, the more accurately the AI can assess each opportunity.
Score Transparency
On Pro and Team tiers and above, you can click on any opportunity's score to see a breakdown of which factors contributed positively and negatively. This helps you understand why an opportunity scored the way it did and whether it is still worth pursuing despite a lower overall score.
Scoring via the Chat Assistant
You can also score opportunities conversationally using the AI chat assistant. Open the chat bubble on your dashboard and ask something like:
"Score this opportunity against my company profile"
The assistant will run the scoring engine and display a color-coded result card with a YES, MAYBE, or NO recommendation. This is especially useful when you want to quickly evaluate opportunities found during a chat search without leaving the conversation.