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How to read the data

Dates​

capabilities reports the date of the corpus, and every response carries as_of for the data it returns. Data is a snapshot that can be weeks or months old. Different parts of one profile can refer to different months: the search demand of a site carries its own reported month.

Traffic figures​

  • Traffic figures are estimates, not the site owner's analytics.
  • Monthly visits are an average over the last twelve months. A site that lost half of its traffic recently still looks large in this average.
  • Growth is the change of the last month against the month before, in bands: collapsing, declining_fast, declining, flat, growing, growing_fast. Band boundaries are in capabilities. One month can be a spike, so treat growth as a signal, not a trend.
  • For small sites, read figures as an order of magnitude rather than an exact count.
  • The scale band describes the traffic of the domain, not the size of the company. A large company with a small regional domain appears small, so scale alone does not filter out large companies; to tell one, check the team size range from reveal_project.
  • The main country is the leading country of the site's traffic, not the company's location.

Bands and exact values​

Traffic, audience and search figures come as bands by default; the quality index and its axes are exact numbers. Exact values of the banded figures are available only for revealed projects, with precision: exact, for a surcharge. Bands are usually enough to answer "organic or paid", "which country", "growing or not". Exact values matter when you compare sites inside the same band. One exception: after a reveal, the month-over-month change of each search query comes as an exact number, without the surcharge.

Niches​

  • A niche is a group of sites close in meaning. Niches form a five-level hierarchy: level 1 holds the narrowest niches, and each higher level groups the niches below it. The default level is reported in capabilities.
  • Niche names and descriptions are generated labels and carry a labeling confidence. Treat a niche as a market definition to refine, not as an official category.
  • Niche edges are fuzzy. A niche can contain sites adjacent to its topic, and a site can be closer to a neighboring niche than to its own. Filtering projects by a niche returns the sites most clearly assigned to it; to catch sites at its edges, add a text or seed search.
  • The corpus is not limited to software. It contains online stores, service businesses, booking sites, publishers and organizations that take donations. Site type separates products from content sites, but not software from commerce, so use text or seed projects to stay within software when that is what you need.

Descriptions​

Each project has a short automated summary of what the site does. Summaries can be generic or imprecise. Before a reveal, the site's own name in its description is replaced with "the site". Read them before revealing, and verify anything important on the site itself after a reveal.

Quality index​

The index runs from 0 to 100 and comes with three axes — liveness, demand quality and acquisition reproducibility — and a site type, product or content. get_project_card with the index part returns each axis value with an explanation of what the axis measures.

The index summarizes the measured profile of a site; it is not a measure of revenue or of business quality. Many sites share close values, so do not rank finely on small differences. The methodology is not published.

Fields from reveal_project​

  • Payment service — the service through which the site entered the corpus: the payment service or platform whose payment page its visitors went to, or a verified-revenue listing. It is a single value, not a list of every method the site accepts, and not necessarily the site's main payment processor. It can be empty. Check it on the site before relying on it.
  • Year founded and team size range can be empty.

Traffic sources and search demand​

  • Direct traffic includes returning users. For a product people log into, a large direct share reflects usage as much as acquisition.
  • The search profile covers all search traffic of the site, including queries that are not about its product.
  • A project with no data for that part returns profile: null, and the part is not charged.