How we rank

Organic ranking score

Every active listing stores a 0–100 score. Catalog browse, typeahead search, country hubs, and the Find AI engine all order by that score (then name) unless a page says otherwise. The function that writes it does not accept payment, affiliate columns, or sponsored placement rows as inputs.

Points currently awarded:

• Pricing freshness: 35 if last checked within 7 days, 25 within 30, 12 within 90, otherwise 0.
• Vendor-claimed listing: +20 when the listing is claimed by the vendor.
• Usable category (not empty or unclassified): +10.
• Usable pricing (known model or a monthly price): +10.
• Usable platforms (at least one platform flagged true): +10.
• Published review scores, recency-weighted with a 90-day half-life: up to 8.
• Average reaction rating: up to 4.
• Net likes minus dislikes: up to 3 extra points when the net is positive.

Never inputs: payment, affiliate status, sponsorship, ad placement. Saving an affiliate URL in the ops tracker does not change search order. Sponsored slots never read or write ranking score.

“Best overall” vs “Best for me”

On Tools, Best overall is the highest ranking score in the filtered set. Best for me re-ranks that same set with price / quality / ease / privacy sliders (quality is the ranking score scaled to 0–1). Those sliders are not a second paid ranking. Compare’s highlighted column is a separate, on-page fit score from budget / country / priority filters you type in — still not a paid slot.

Find AI starts from ranking score, then applies wizard filters (budget, device, privacy preference, and so on). A shortlist role such as “Best value” is a fit label, not a sponsored label.

Confidence levels

Extraction stores high, medium, or low for pricing extraction and for facet extraction. Those are machine-confidence labels, not human endorsements.

• High — required, together with a safe moderation result, a successful fetch, a real taxonomy category, and no duplicate/shortener host, before a newly discovered tool auto-publishes as active. The gate is: moderation safe; pricing confidence high; facet confidence high; fetch ok; publishable category; not a duplicate or shortener host.
• High, unclaimed — scraper output may auto-apply to the live listing. Pricing auto-applies on first fill, or when an existing number moves by less than 50% without a model change. Feature/integration lists auto-apply only when the scraper is adding items, not removing them.
• Medium or low — does not auto-publish. Field diffs go to pending changes for a person to review.

Vendor-confirmed outranks scraped. Vendor-claimed listings never take scraper writes live; diffs go to pending review. The vendor is emailed. If nobody answers for 30 days, the row surfaces on claim review. Claimed listings still get the +20 organic bonus above; that bonus is for having completed domain-email verification, not for paying us.

Verification badges

Listing badges are earned from stored flags, not from ranking score:

• Vendor verified — the listing is claimed (vendor-claimed flag or a vendor-verified badge). Claim requires an email on the tool’s domain (or a closely related company domain that ops reviews).
• Human reviewed — a human-reviewed badge on the listing.
• Community verified — a community-verified badge. Community tags only appear in discovery filters after 10 upvotes.

Independent hands-on testing is not live yet. Tool pages omit test notes rather than inventing lab results.

Affiliate policy

“Visit site” buttons use a cloaked /go/<tool-id> redirect. Outbound Visit site uses a cloaked hop: the tracking link when set, otherwise the tool website. That choice is not a ranking input. The hop is logged as an affiliate click for reconciliation; the destination URL is not stored in that event. We label Affiliate and disclose a possible commission only when the visit uses a tagged tracking link, not when the hop is the ordinary vendor website.

We do not sell a higher ranking score. Affiliate program status (not applied / applied / approved / rejected) is an outreach tracker only.

Display ads in header, sidebar, in-content, search, and tool-page slots are labeled Advertisement, or Affiliate when the placement is tagged with an affiliate network. Those slots also never write ranking score.

Sponsored placements

A sponsored listing is an existing catalog row promoted into a separate strip. The public label is always Sponsored — never “Featured.” At most 2 tools show in a strip. Display order is category-filter specificity, then placement id — not ranking score.

Contexts that can show a strip: Category page, Search results, Homepage featured, Comparison page. Unfiltered /tools (no search query, no single category) does not load a strip. A sponsored card can also appear on the homepage featured slot and on comparison pages.

Paid placement does not merge into organic results as an unlabeled boost. If the same tool also appears in the organic grid, the grid row stays Organic; the strip stays Sponsored.

Deals

Deal rows are not ranked by payment. They are listed by expiry then created date. Certainty is a separate badge: verified discount, potential discount, or public promotion. A listed percentage is never used as a stand-in for certainty.

How to read the three listing labels

• Organic — catalog ranking or a deal/compare column that was not bought as a strip.
• Sponsored — paid strip for an existing listing.
• Affiliate — outbound hop that may earn us a commission, or an ad slot tagged to an affiliate network.

A single card can be Organic as a listing and Affiliate as a visit button. That is intentional: the rank is unpaid; the click path still might pay us.