Most forwarders treat the "countries you serve" field on a directory profile as decoration — a place to look bigger. On CargoLinked it is the opposite of decoration: it is the query that decides which freight requests you are ever shown. Leave it empty and the platform can only match you on one country, your HQ. Every lead on every other lane you actually run goes to someone else, or to no one.
The short answer
When a shipper publishes a freight request, CargoLinked alerts the forwarders whose coverage touches the lane. You match a request when any one of three things is true: you serve worldwide, your HQ country is the request's origin or destination, or one of your declared served countries is the origin or destination. That is the whole rule — and it means an empty served-countries list quietly narrows your lead flow to shipments touching your home country only. Declaring the lanes you genuinely quote is not profile polish; it is subscribing to the leads on those lanes.
How matching actually works
The check runs per request, against both ends of the lane:
| Your profile says | You are matched to |
|---|---|
| Nothing beyond HQ country | Only requests where your HQ country is the origin or the destination |
| HQ + served countries | Requests where any of those countries is the origin or the destination |
| Serves worldwide | Every request — use this only if you can genuinely quote most lanes, or you will spend your time declining |
Matching is by country, not by port or city, and it is case-insensitive on the country name. The same rule gates quoting itself — you cannot quote a request your coverage does not touch — so the field controls both what you see and what you can act on.
What an empty field costs, in real numbers
Being candid about our own marketplace: in a recent review, roughly a third of published freight requests reached zero forwarders — not because nobody runs those lanes, but because nobody had declared them. Most live listings were matchable on exactly one country. Those requests were real shippers with real cargo, and the leads went unanswered.
That is the situation coverage fixes. A forwarder in Malaysia who quietly also quotes China, Vietnam and the UAE, but has declared nothing, sees only Malaysia-touching requests — a fraction of their real market on the platform.
How to set your coverage well
- Declare the countries you would actually quote this month. Not your ambitions — your working lanes. A lead you always decline trains you to ignore alerts.
- Both ends count, so think in corridors. If you run Ningbo–Rotterdam, declaring China and the Netherlands doubles the requests that can reach you on that corridor: exports from one, imports into the other.
- Use worldwide honestly. It is the right setting for genuine global NVOCCs and networks. For everyone else it produces noise, and declined leads are worse than no leads.
- Revisit it when your lanes change. Won a new agency agreement in Turkey? That belongs in your coverage the same week — the same rule as keeping your listing itself current.
What happens after you match
Matched forwarders get the lead by email as it is published, plus a daily digest of open requests on their lanes. From there it is a quoting race with normal rules: fast, specific, all-in quotes win — the buyer's side of that comparison is in how shippers compare freight quotes, and it is worth reading precisely because it is the rubric your quote is scored against.
Quoting is free for your first five quotes; after that, unlimited quoting comes with a Connected membership. The coverage field itself is free and takes about two minutes.
The two-minute version
- Open your company profile (or claim your listing first if you have not — here is what claiming involves).
- Add every country you genuinely quote, both origins and destinations.
- Tick worldwide only if it is true.
Coverage is the highest-leverage two minutes available on your listing: everything else on the profile improves how you look, this one changes what you receive.
