The significance of heterogeneous catalysis extends across fields such as energy production, 1 carbon dioxide conversion, and the synthesis of numerous chemicals, underlining its indispensable role in advancing sustainable and economically viable chemical processes. Accurate chemical models are important, especially in the context of catalyst screening and discovery, where having an accurate model prior to synthesizing a new catalyst could save time, money, and resources. Mean field microkinetic modeling (MKM) is a valuable tool to quantitatively describe the reaction rates and intermediates' thermodynamics of a process, as it is less computationally taxing compared to spatially-resolved methods like Kinetic Monte Carlo. Therefore, MKM is often used for process design and theoretical catalyst screening. To determine thermodynamics in MKM, Density Functional Theory (DFT) is a widely acknowledged quantum mechanical approach to study the energy of intermediates in a model. However, its computational expense for solid-state matter poses a challenge. Surrogates such as linear scaling relationships (LSRs) and machine learning (ML) models are developed to approximate the DFT results at much lower cost. LSRs connect the molecular binding energy to the binding energy of the atom(s) in a molecule that are bonded to the surface. They can be used to estimate the di↵erence in adsorption energy of a molecule between two metal surfaces. In the context of MKM, LSRs help provide energy estimates for intermediates on di↵erent surfaces, so the material search space can be expanded for catalyst discovery. Previous studies show that LSRs can be applied in modeling many commercially important systems such as synthesis gas conversion, oxygen reduction, etc. However, LSRs are sometimes limited by the morphology of catalysts and the coverage of the adsorbates, and they appear to fail on some alloy systems due to the site specificity and lateral interactions. In addition, utilizing LSRs still requires conducting a few DFT calculations on similar adsorption systems to establish the linear relationship. It should be noted that the linear scaling relationships referenced throughout this article refer to the linear relationships between adsorbate binding energies, not the linear relationship between the activation energy of a reaction and the enthalpy of reaction.