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Pursuit Finds Your Soil Specs in Seconds, Cited to the Page

The numbers that move an earthwork bid are buried in a geotech report nobody has time to read twice. Pursuit extracts them in one click and cites every value to the exact page so you can verify it yourself.

Mark Schwab·July 20, 2026
Pursuit soils report extraction table showing 11 soil characteristics pulled from a geotechnical report, including optimal moisture, expansion index, and seismic settlement, each cited to its page with the source text highlighted

The geotechnical report shows up with the rest of the bid documents, and it is never short. Forty pages if you are lucky, a few hundred if you are not. Somewhere in there are the numbers that decide whether you make money moving dirt: optimal moisture, expansion index, shrinkage, seismic settlement, the section where remedial earthwork starts.

On bid day, nobody reads all of it. You skim, you search the PDF for "moisture," and you hope the number you missed was not the one that mattered. Miss an 8 percent moisture density spec and you have priced compaction wrong on every yard of fill.

The 36-second version

No monks, no monasteries. Just Pursuit.

Why soil specs get missed

It is not carelessness. Geotech reports are written by engineers for engineers. The values an estimator needs are scattered across narrative paragraphs, boring logs, and tables, and no two firms format them the same way. Under a bid-day clock, hunting through 86 pages for one settlement figure is time you do not have, so the report gets skimmed. That is where the expensive misses come from: moisture conditioning you did not price, imported fill you did not plan for, remedial earthwork that shows up in section 4.02 and nowhere else.

How it works

  1. Drop the report into your project. Pursuit indexes it along with your plans, specs, emails, and takeoff exports. No folders, no tagging.
  2. Click Extract. Pursuit reads the whole PDF and pulls the soil characteristics into one table: existing and optimal moisture, expansion index, shrinkage, subsidence, seismic settlement, and whatever else the report states. In the demo above, an 86-page report gives up 11 characteristics in one pass.
  3. Check the source. Every value carries the page it came from. Click a row and the report opens at that page with the source text highlighted. Verifying a number takes seconds instead of another trip through the whole document.
  4. Ask follow-ups. The same project chat that answers scope and deadline questions answers soils questions too, in plain English, cited to the document and page.

What it does when the answer is not there

When the report does not state a value, the table says "could not find." It does not guess, and it does not fill the gap with a plausible number. A blank you can see is worth more than a figure you cannot trust. The point of the tool is not to read for you, it is to make checking fast. You still own the bid. Pursuit just hands you the numbers with receipts.

Try it on your next geotech report

Soils extraction is one piece of Pursuit, our AI-powered CRM and bid management tool. Every drawing, spec, email, and quote for a bid lives in one place, and the project brain answers questions about all of it. Create a free account, drop in a soils report from a live pursuit, and see what it pulls out. If it saves you one read-through of a 500-page PDF, it has earned the five minutes it took to try.

See it for yourself

Try BidScreen XL free for 14 days.

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