For me it's the whitepaper. In essence, you can see their intentions from reading their whitepaper. You can also spot unsuspecting things from the team by reading the whitepaper. For me though, I decide in the whitepaper to see whether the project is being handled by 15 year old monkeys or a dedicated developers. Well, we have our own preference, this is just mine.
The white paper is always good to read the news about the company and their future deals about the project, till now I have gone through many company white papers and failed to lead that development, not only Whitepaper we should keep track the team in all possible ways. I will trade coins when it is listed higher volume exchanges.
I agree about the Whitepaper parts, but I stopped doing trades on major exchanges and only trade on smaller ones now like Uniswap. Uniswap is able to integrate smart contracts in a way that token creators can be creative (as seen with DeFi and ReFi spaces). For instance, SiFi can have 5% fees on all trades en automatically redistribute them among holders. I think those kinds of mechanics will be more common but they are not possible on Binance.
So I guess what I look for is that they are only listed on Uniswap so that I am sure the mechanics are in place.
I often look for low market cap and low total supply (<10 million).