Methodology · Public & Auditable
Every position is earned. None is for sale.
Vanity registries hide how they decide. Institutions publish it. This page documents exactly how every name on LANDMARK gets its position — so you can verify it yourself.
“You can't buy your way in.
You can only claim what's already yours.”
The algorithm decides who appears and where. Payment only activates a plate the algorithm already granted — it never creates, moves, or upgrades one.
No company, agency, or PR firm — not even ours — can influence a position. The index answers to its sources, not to its subscribers.
Twelve public, independent signals grouped into six pillars. No private data, no self-reported metrics, no images. Faking a position requires manipulating press, backlinks, Wikipedia and three communities at once — every pillar multiplies the cost of fraud.
Domain traffic rank and backlink-graph authority (Common Crawl). Real backlinks take years to build — the slowest signal to fake.
Worldwide news coverage over the cycle window, from the largest open news database on earth. Real journalism, not press releases.
Article pageviews plus the number of languages your article exists in. The world looking a name up — not the name promoting itself.
Followers and stars, real package downloads, developer mindshare. Adoption you can't buy — code either gets used or it doesn't.
What the technical community actually discusses, cycle by cycle — story points and thread engagement across two independent communities.
Research citations and creator reach — applied to individuals only, where scholarship and audience are genuine prestige.
| Pillar | Company | Individual |
|---|---|---|
| Web Authority | 25% | 10% |
| Global Press | 20% | 15% |
| Public Relevance | 20% | 20% |
| Engineering Gravity | 20% | 30% |
| Conversation | 15% | 15% |
| Academic & Creator | — | 10% |
Missing data never punishes: if an entity has no signal in a pillar (a non-tech company without GitHub, say), that pillar's weight is redistributed across the ones that do respond. A minimum of 3 pillars with signal is required to be indexed.
Every cycle, every entity goes through the same five steps. No exceptions, no manual overrides.
Collect
Raw signals pulled from twelve public sources across six pillars, for every indexed entity.
Normalize
Each source is scaled so no single metric's raw magnitude dominates the others.
Weight
Each pillar is weighted by entity type (see table above) — companies lean on web authority and press; individuals on engineering and scholarship.
Anti-spike filter
Suspicious growth is penalized before ranking (see rule below).
Rank & tier
Entities are ordered by final score and assigned a tier by percentile. The grid is redrawn.
Prestige is built, not manufactured. If an entity's score jumps more than 300% in a single cycle — the signature of bought followers, coordinated voting, or manufactured virality — the spike is cut to 45% of its value for that cycle. Genuine momentum survives this filter easily: real growth compounds across cycles instead of exploding in one.
Tiers are relative to the cycle's top score — they shift as the web shifts. Tier determines plate size on the canvas, never position.
On the first day of every month the entire index is recalculated from scratch. Every position is re-earned. Nothing carries over by inertia — not even for paying subscribers.
When a cycle closes, its full canvas is frozen into the public Historical Archive — a permanent, browsable record of who held which position, in which cycle. We preserve our own history because we intend to be around for it.
Identity verification is required before checkout — only the entity itself can claim its plate.
Payments processed by Paddle (Merchant of Record) · Cancel anytime · Plate simply returns to open.
The scoring engine is open source. Read the exact code that computed every position on the canvas — weights, normalization, anti-spike and all.
View source on GitHub ↗The index is built from public data, but appearing on it is your choice. Request removal and your name comes off the canvas immediately — no questions, no friction.
Request opt-out →Is your name already on it?