A 7-point creator vetting checklist
If you only have 20 minutes per creator, run these in order. The first three are cheap and eliminate most of the list. The next four are where the real signal is.
1. Comment authenticity
Open the last 5 posts. Tap on the top 10 commenters. Are they real accounts with their own posts, followers, and consistent activity? Or are they thin profiles posting the same one-word comments across 50 other creators? Fraud is cheaper to detect than it has ever been. You can spot it in under two minutes per creator.
2. Sponsored-post view ratio
Find their last 5 sponsored posts (look for #ad, #sponsored, "paid partnership" labels, or anchor brand mentions). Compare view counts to their organic posts from the same week. If sponsored posts pull less than 60 percent of organic views, the audience has tuned out the ad content. Pass.
3. Posting consistency
Have they posted in the last 14 days? Two months ago? Six? Creators who post sporadically get sporadic engagement. You want a steady cadence so your post lands in a warm feed, not a cold one.
4. Repeat brand history
Has any brand sponsored them more than once? Two posts for the same brand is a strong signal that the first one worked. Three or more is gold. We weight this heavily because brands do not re-up campaigns that did not pay.
5. Audience overlap
This is the hardest signal to capture without paid tools. You want to know whether their audience demographic overlaps the demographic of people who buy your product. Failing access to platform analytics, the next-best proxy is the brand list — which brands have sponsored this creator before, and do those brands target the same customer you do?
6. Content fit
Watch three of their recent organic posts the whole way through. Could you imagine your product being mentioned in the middle of that content without it feeling jarring? If yes, content fit is high. If you have to imagine them changing their format to fit your product, content fit is low and the post will underperform.
7. Response rate
This one you only learn by pitching. Creators who answer within 48 hours and ask substantive questions about the brand are 4 to 5 times more likely to deliver a strong post than creators who reply in two weeks with one-line questions about deliverables. The pitch process is the audition.
How to use this
The first three checks knock out about 40 percent of any shortlist. Run them first. The next three checks knock out another 30 to 40 percent. Run them on the survivors. The last check is the final filter, applied during outreach. By the end you have a small set of creators where the vetting work has already eliminated most of the downside.
This is essentially the scoring model we use at Influencer Advisory, simplified. The full version pulls signal from a few thousand prior partnerships, but the 7-point version above will get you most of the way.