What has changed

Boards can be downloaded and cited. Every published board is now available as a CSV carrying the same rows the page shows — rank, product, score, and the plain evidence line behind each signal — and every board and product page carries a citation line with the date the numbers were measured. The per-signal internals stay out of the file, as they stay off the page.

Products with the same score now share a rank. Products the measurement did not separate had been numbered one after another, which ordered them alphabetically by their web address. On one board fourteen products held the same score and were published as ranks 24 through 37 — so a company reading "#30 of 37" saw six products ahead of them that no measurement had placed there. Equal scores now share a position, and a shared position is marked as one.

A published quote must be the product’s own words. Rows had been quoting whatever text a capture found first, which on several boards meant navigation and error strings rather than a company’s description of itself — one board’s top row led with "Skip to content". Separately, an AI engine’s answer filed under one product sometimes named only other products. A quote now has to be a real line from the page it claims to come from, and an engine’s answer has to name the product it is filed under, or neither is published.

Buyer demand stopped counting the dictionary. That signal counts how many buyers search for a product by name. For products whose name is an everyday English word it had been counting the word — one product was published as drawing 900,000 searches a month, which was the word and not the company. Common-word names now require a second signal before a figure is published, and where we have no figure the page says so rather than printing a zero, which would read as a market fact rather than as a gap in our measurement.

Three claims removed from the what-changed pages. A page reporting what had changed in a market said one product gave up 18 points, when the difference was our own measurement changing rather than the market — an AI engine had stopped answering between the two dates. Two pricing changes were reported that were extraction wobble, including a free tier described as removed while it was live. A funding round from January was listed under recent news because its date was compared as text. All three are now gated, and where two captures cannot be compared the page names which reason rather than reporting that nothing moved.

Every capture records which engines answered it. Without that record, a comparison between two dates cannot tell a real market movement from an engine having been unavailable on one of them. Captures now carry it, and any movement across a pair that does not is withheld rather than estimated.

Review counts and community mentions removed entirely. Both had carried a weight of zero since the Index launched, on the grounds that a signal a company can buy should not decide a position. They are now not collected at all — not gathered, not stored, not weighed. A weightless signal still sits in the pipeline and can be re-weighted later; one we never gather cannot. In the same change, whether a product is gaining or losing ground against its market became a signal that decides a position.