Searches
What a saved search does on each run, what every filter changes, and how to tell a broken search from a quiet market.
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A saved search is a standing question you have asked of Upwork: which postings are worth your attention. It runs on its own schedule, independently of every other search you have, and each one keeps its own filters, its own draft mode and its own daily cap.
Creating one costs 5 credits. Everything after that is free except drafting: editing filters, pausing, resuming, reading the log and switching draft mode all cost nothing.
Having several narrow searches is usually better than one broad one. A narrow search gives you a daily cap and a draft mode that suit that kind of work, and its log is readable, which a firehose is not.
| Filter | Effect |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Sent to Upwork as the query. This is the widest lever you have: everything else only narrows what these return. |
| Excluded keywords | Applied after the fetch, on our side. A posting containing any of these is dropped before it is scored, so exclusions cost nothing. |
| Skills | Passed to Upwork, and also given to the scorer as a hint of the kind of work you want. Not a requirement the posting must satisfy in full. |
| Minimum hourly rate / fixed budget | Filters the feed, and sets the floor a suggested bid is written against. |
| Client minimum spend and hires | Filters on the client's history rather than the posting. The strongest quality lever there is, and the easiest one to set so high nothing gets through. |
| Payment verified | Only postings from clients who have verified billing with Upwork. Worth leaving on. |
| Experience level | Upwork's own entry / intermediate / expert tag on the posting. |
| Poll interval | How often this search looks. Minimum 60 seconds. |
| Max drafts per day | A spend cap, not an apply cap. Once this many proposals have been drafted today, further matches wait rather than draft. |
Fast for the searches that matter, slower for the rest
Every completed check writes a row to the search's Activity page, including the checks that found nothing — which are the ones the page mostly exists to explain. Rows are kept for 30 days.
Each row carries a one-line outcome:
| Outcome | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Drafted | Matched new postings and started writing proposals for them. |
| Matched | Matched new postings and alerted you. This search is set to alert only, so nothing was drafted and no credits were spent. |
| Daily cap hit | Matched new postings, but this search had already used its drafts for the day. The rest are waiting in Matches. |
| Empty feed | Upwork returned no postings at all for these filters. If every run says this, the filters are probably too narrow. |
| Nothing new | Upwork returned postings, but you had already seen every one of them. |
| All filtered out | New postings arrived, but each one was dropped before scoring: too old for the poll window, or restricted to a country you cannot work from. |
| None relevant | New postings arrived, but none of them scored high enough against your profile to be worth a proposal. |
| Out of credits | Postings matched, but your balance was too low to draft. They are waiting, and drafting resumes as soon as you top up. |
| Run failed | This run did not finish. Nothing was charged. |
Underneath each row are the counts it came from: how many postings Upwork returned, how many were new to your account, how many matched, and how many were drafted. Reading the outcome first and the numbers second is the fast way round; a row of five numbers on its own tells you very little.
Nearly every “is this thing working?” question resolves to one of four patterns in the log.
| Most runs say | What to change |
|---|---|
| Empty feed | The filters are narrower than the market. Drop the client minimum spend first, then widen keywords. Client filters exclude far more than people expect. |
| None relevant | Postings arrive but score under 0.50. The keywords are catching adjacent work. Check your Upwork profile is synced too, since it is half of what the score is judged against. |
| Nothing new | Normal for a narrow search in a slow category: the same postings keep coming back. Lengthen the poll interval and stop watching it. |
| Run failed | The Upwork connection needs attention. Reconnect from Integrations; nothing was charged for the failed runs. |
A paused search writes no rows at all. If the log simply stops on a date, check whether the search was switched off then.