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Rankings and data

How tools are ordered in listings

Sponsored, then verified, then popularity, traffic and rating — with A–Z only as a tiebreak.

“Most popular” — the default on the homepage Popular grid, the Top 100 and most lists — works down this order. Category pages use a different order, set out further down.

The six ordering keys for most lists as a cascade: sponsored, popularity score, monthly visits, upvotes, review score, and title A to Z, each consulted only when everything above it has tied. Being verified is not one of them.
Each key decides the order only when everything above it has tied.
  1. Sponsored listings first
  2. Popularity Score, highest first
  3. Monthly visits, highest first
  4. Upvotes, highest first
  5. Review score, highest first
  6. Title A–Z

Being verified does not move a tool up this list (it does on category pages — see below). It used to sit at step two, and the result was that a verified tool with a low popularity score could lead a page of far more popular ones. Verification says the listing details are confirmed with the people who run the tool — it is not a measure of how popular the tool is, so it no longer competes with one. It still leads the New AI Tools and Free AI Tools lists, where the question being asked is different.

Review score sits last on purpose. It is an average out of five, so it ties constantly and reads high on a single five-star review — a tool with one perfect review has no business outranking a tool with two hundred averaging 4.8. Upvotes sit above it because they at least count something.

Monthly visits and the Popularity Score are close relatives — traffic is the largest input to the score — so visits only ever separate two tools the score has already tied. A tool we have not measured traffic for counts as zero here and sinks below one we have.

The last step is only there so that two otherwise identical tools always appear in the same order on every page load. It is a tiebreak, never a ranking.

The Free AI Tools and New AI Tools lists are the exception: there, verified tools come straight after sponsored ones. See The Free, New and Top 100 lists.

Category pages

The default order on every category and sub-category page is:

  1. Sponsored listings first
  2. Verified listings next
  3. Review score, highest first
  4. Upvotes, highest first
  5. Popularity Score, highest first
  6. Monthly visits, highest first
  7. Title A–Z

On a category page, listings confirmed by the people who run the tool come before the rest, and among tools on equal footing, what visitors here think of a tool — its reviews and upvotes — decides before its traffic does.

The other sorts

Newest first orders by the date a tool was listed here. Highest rated orders by review score. Name (A–Z) is alphabetical. All three ignore the order above.

There is no “most visited” sort. It was removed because the number behind it was not a real measurement.

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