Keelway
Composite ranking · One keystroke · TMS write-back

Five ranked carriers. One keystroke. Load covered.

Keelway takes the 40 carrier replies per posted load, runs each one through trust scoring and rate extraction, and lines up the top five along the keel. Every row has the score, the rate-vs-market percentile, and the one-key actions. Coordinators spend 90 seconds on a decision that used to take an hour. TMS write-back happens automatically on acceptance.

Book a covering demoCompare to Parade
40+
carrier replies ranked per posted load
Keelway broker data, 2026
~90s
coordinator time from ranked list to acceptance
Keelway customer cohort, Q1 2026
2.3×
loads covered per coordinator after Keelway
Keelway customer cohort, Q1 2026

Why covering a load still takes 45–60 minutes without Keelway

Freight coordinators are not slow. The process they work inside is slow. A posted load generates 40 carrier email replies. Each reply sits in Gmail. The coordinator opens each one, extracts the rate mentally, opens FMCSA Safer in a new tab, checks authority and insurance, compares the rate to memory or a spreadsheet, and then decides whether to respond. Four out of 40 carriers get a real response. The other 36 get silence, a bounce, or a canned decline if the coordinator is being thorough.

The labor math is brutal: 40 emails at 4–6 minutes each is 160–240 minutes of triage per load. A coordinator covering 20 loads a day should be spending 3,200 minutes — more than 53 hours — on triage alone. The only way this works is that coordinators don't do it. They skim, they gut-check, they move fast and accept risk. Keelway removes the risk from the skimming.

How the composite ranking algorithm works

Keelway's ranking is not a single score. It is a weighted composite of four independent signals, each sourced from a different layer of the triage pipeline.

Signal 1

Carrier trust score

The FMCSA authority, insurance, inspection, and fraud-signal composite described on the carrier trust score page. Carriers below a configurable trust floor are removed from the ranked list entirely — they move to the flag queue. Carriers above the floor are ranked relative to each other on this dimension. A carrier with long operating history, active authority, current insurance, and a clean SMS score can earn up to 35 ranking points from this signal alone.
Signal 2

Rate vs. market percentile

Keelway expresses every offered rate as a percentile against the trailing 90-day distribution of carrier quotes on that exact origin-destination-equipment corridor — built from the lane history of extracted rate data. A carrier quoting at the 25th percentile (well below market) scores high on this dimension; a carrier quoting at the 90th percentile scores low. The ranking rewards carriers who are priced to win your business, not carriers who are fishing.
Signal 3

Historical lane fit

A carrier who has successfully covered this specific corridor for your brokerage — or a closely adjacent one — is a lower execution risk than a carrier who has never touched the lane. Keelway indexes every completed load by carrier, lane, and equipment type and builds a per-carrier lane-fit score. This signal is per-brokerage by definition: it is built from your history, not a global carrier database.
Signal 4

Response speed

Time between load posting and carrier reply is a weak but real signal of carrier availability and urgency. A carrier who replies within 5 minutes is almost certainly available. A carrier who replies 6 hours later is either running a high volume of load-board fishing or genuinely uncertain about capacity. Response speed carries the lowest composite weight of the four signals; it is a tiebreaker between similar carriers, not a primary sort dimension.
Config

Configurable weight distribution

Keelway's default weights are calibrated on aggregate broker data. But every brokerage has different risk tolerance and margin structure. A high-volume drayage desk that runs the same 8 lanes every day cares more about lane fit than rate percentile. A spot-market flatbed desk running 40 new lanes a week cares more about trust and rate. Ranking weights are configurable per brokerage in the settings panel, and Keelway adjusts them automatically over time based on your accept/decline history.
Auto-accept

Semi-autonomous coverage on defined lanes

For lanes where your brokerage has high historical confidence, Keelway's auto-accept rules let you define a trust floor and a rate ceiling for automatic booking. Any carrier who clears both thresholds on a qualifying lane gets booked without a coordinator click — the rate-con draft sends, the TMS gets written, and the coordinator sees the acceptance in their queue with a one-click override window. Auto-accept is opt-in, per-lane, and fully audited.

The coordinator workflow — keyboard native

Keelway's load view is designed for coordinators who live in dense row interfaces. Every action in the ranked list has a keyboard shortcut:

  • j / k — move down / up through ranked rows
  • a — accept the selected carrier
  • c — open the counter-offer panel
  • r — send a request-more-info reply
  • d — decline
  • Enter — open the carrier detail drawer (full parsed email, FMCSA snapshot, top 3 ranking reasons)
  • / — focus the load search bar

A coordinator who knows the keyboard shortcuts can action five ranked carriers in under 30 seconds without reaching for the mouse. The interface is dense by design — no card-per-screen layouts, no kanban boards, no modals for simple decisions. Brokers think in tables; Keelway renders tables.

TMS write-back — no double entry

When a coordinator accepts a carrier, Keelway writes the result back to the connected TMS automatically. Pre-built integrations cover Tai TMS, McLeod LoadMaster, Aljex (Descartes), Revenova (Salesforce), Turvo, and Rose Rocket. The accepted carrier name, MC number, offered rate, equipment type, and lane confirmation flow to the TMS in the native record format — no coordinator retyping, no rate-con template copy-paste. See the full platform overview on the freight broker solutions page.

Where AI load covering fits in the triage pipeline

AI load covering is the third step in Keelway's pipeline — after rate extraction and trust scoring. The full sequence: (1) carrier email lands in inbox; (2) Keelway extracts rate, equipment, and lane in under 4 seconds; (3) trust score is applied against FMCSA and fraud signals; (4) composite ranking surfaces the top five along the keel; (5) coordinator accepts in one keystroke; (6) TMS write-back confirms. The end-to-end cycle from email receipt to covered load runs in under 10 seconds of machine time. The coordinator's 90 seconds is decision time, not labor.

After coverage, Keelway's AI phone-call agent handles carrier check-calls and delivery alerting — but that is a separate workflow. See the carrier email automation page for the full pipeline end-to-end, or compare Keelway to Parade on the Parade alternative page.

Who runs this kind of load volume

The ranking primitive is most valuable at the load volumes where manual triage breaks: typically 15+ loads per coordinator per day. Below that threshold, coordinators can manually triage inbound emails in real time. Above it, the math collapses and coordinators start cutting corners on trust checks and rate comparisons. The brokerages where Keelway drives the most measurable throughput lift are mid-market desks running 15–40 loads per coordinator — dry van, reefer, flatbed, and drayage books where the lane set is large enough that lane-fit history carries real signal.

Frequently asked questions

What is AI load covering?+
AI load covering is the automated process of ranking inbound carrier replies by multiple signals — trust, offered rate versus market, historical lane fit, and response speed — and surfacing the best five for a coordinator to action in seconds. Keelway does this on every posted load, compressing 45–60 minutes of manual triage into roughly 90 seconds of human decision-making.
How does Keelway rank carrier replies?+
Keelway's composite ranking algorithm weighs four inputs: the carrier trust score (0–100, built from FMCSA authority, insurance, inspection data, and fraud signals), the offered rate expressed as a percentile against the trailing 90-day distribution on that lane, the historical lane-fit score (how often this carrier has successfully covered this corridor or equipment type with your brokerage), and response speed (time between load posting and email reply, as a proxy for carrier availability and urgency). The weights are configurable per brokerage and adapt over time based on your accept/decline history.
Does this replace my ability to pick the carrier I want?+
No. Keelway surfaces the top five ranked rows. The coordinator accepts, counters, requests more information, or declines from the row — one keystroke each. The ranking is a starting point, not an autonomous dispatcher. If a coordinator regularly overrides rank #1 for a specific carrier, Keelway learns that preference and adjusts the per-brokerage lane-fit weight accordingly.
What does 'one keystroke to accept' actually mean?+
In the Keelway load view, each ranked row has four action keys: Accept (A), Counter (C), Request Info (R), Decline (D). Pressing Accept on rank #1 confirms the carrier, triggers the rate-confirmation draft in your inbox voice, and queues the TMS write-back. The coordinator never leaves the ranked-list view. Keyboard shortcuts j/k navigate rows, Enter opens the carrier detail drawer, and / focuses search.
How does TMS write-back work on acceptance?+
When a coordinator accepts a carrier, Keelway writes the accepted carrier name, MC number, offered rate, equipment type, and lane confirmation back to the connected TMS — Tai, McLeod, Aljex, Revenova, Turvo, or Rose Rocket. The rate confirmation is drafted in the coordinator's email voice and sent from the carrier-facing inbox. No double entry in the TMS. No copy-paste into a rate-con template.
Can I auto-accept carriers above a certain trust and rate threshold?+
Yes. Keelway's auto-accept rules let you define a trust score floor and a rate-vs-market ceiling for specific lanes or equipment types where your brokerage has high confidence. For example: on a Chicago–Atlanta 53' dry van lane where you've covered 200 loads, you might auto-accept any carrier above trust 75 quoting within 3% of the lane median. Auto-accept rules are opt-in, per-lane, and audited — every auto-accepted load shows in the coordinator's queue with a one-click override window.
How does historical lane fit get calculated?+
Keelway indexes every carrier you've booked by lane and equipment type and builds a per-carrier coverage success rate on each corridor. A carrier who has successfully picked up and delivered 15 Chicago–Atlanta dry van loads for your brokerage with no service failures gets a high lane-fit score on that corridor. A carrier appearing for the first time on that lane gets a neutral score. Lane fit is one of four ranking inputs — it does not dominate, but it provides a meaningful signal for lanes your brokerage runs repeatedly.
What about carriers who reply fast but have low trust scores?+
Response speed is a positive signal, not a tie-breaker. A carrier who replies in 4 minutes but scores a 28 on trust will still rank low — trust and rate percentile carry more composite weight. Speed is useful for distinguishing between two similar carriers where one is clearly available and the other is testing the lane. The weight distribution is visible and adjustable in your brokerage's ranking configuration.
Does Keelway cover loads autonomously without a coordinator?+
Not by default. Keelway is a decision-support layer, not an autonomous dispatcher. The auto-accept rules feature enables semi-autonomous coverage on tightly defined lane and trust parameters — but a coordinator is always in the loop unless they explicitly configure a rule to remove themselves. Full autonomous tendering is on the roadmap for 2027, gated behind enterprise contracts and shipper approval workflows.
How does this compare to Parade.ai?+
Parade's CoDriver is outbound — it calls carriers to source capacity for loads you haven't covered yet. Keelway is inbound — it triages the 40 carrier replies that already landed in your inbox and ranks the best ones for the coordinator to action. Different wedge, complementary at the enterprise level. See the full breakdown on our Parade alternative page.
Trust · Rate · Lane fit · Response speed

The ranking layer every freight desk is building manually.

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