{"slug": "how-the-rankings-work-and-what-we-refuse-to-count", "title": "How the rankings work — and what we refuse to count", "summary": "RSS Atlas, a directory of RSS feeds, has published how its rankings work, emphasizing that positions are not for sale and that sponsored placements are excluded from ranking calculations. The rankings are based on favorites, page views, and AI fetches, with time decay, and the coefficients are kept secret to prevent gaming. The project also ensures that MCP responses, search results, OPML exports, and badges never include ads, to maintain trust in the directory.", "body_md": "Positions in RSS Atlas are **not for sale**. There are ad slots, but they are separate, labelled \"Ad\", and take no part in the ranking calculation.\n\nAnyone can write that sentence, so here is what is actually counted — and, more importantly, what is deliberately not.\n\n| Signal | What it represents |\n|---|---|\nFavorites |\nSomeone decided they wanted to come back to it |\nPage views |\nThe feed's detail page was opened |\nAI fetches |\nAn AI tool retrieved the feed over MCP |\n\nThese are combined with **time decay**, so recent interest counts for more. A feed read heavily last year sits below one being read this week.\n\n**The ordering is public**: favorites weigh most, then views, then AI fetches. The **coefficients and thresholds are not**. Publishing the exact numbers would amount to publishing which signal is cheapest to inflate.\n\nThis is the axis other directories do not have.\n\nSearch traffic is falling while assistants increasingly compose the answer, which makes **what the AI reads** a separate fact from what humans open. Feeds exist — reference documentation is the obvious case — that people rarely click through to but agents pull repeatedly.\n\nThis half matters more.\n\nPublishing what you count invites people to manufacture it. AI fetches are the exposed surface, since there is an unauthenticated demo path, so:\n\nNone of that is airtight, which is why **AI fetches carry the smallest weight** of the three.\n\nWhen an AI tool calls `get_rankings`\n\n, what comes back is **purely organic**. The sponsored-placement data is not consulted by that query at all.\n\nThe website shows ads. **MCP responses, search results, OPML exports and badges never will.** Mixing advertising into the data an agent reads would remove the reason for this directory to exist.\n\nThe [rankings](https://rssatlas.com/rankings) table shows position, feed count, favorites, AI fetches and score as columns. **You can follow why something sits where it does** without taking our word for it.\n\nCategory and tag rankings work the same way, ordered by the summed score of the feeds they contain.\n\nThe transparency is not altruism. **A directory whose ordering cannot be trusted has no value left** — the moment positions become purchasable, it is a list of adverts, not a directory.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-the-rankings-work-and-what-we-refuse-to-count", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/rss-atlas/how-the-rankings-work-and-what-we-refuse-to-count-4d6d", "published_at": "2026-08-14 16:57:52+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-14 17:05:29.042489+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-products", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["RSS Atlas"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-the-rankings-work-and-what-we-refuse-to-count", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-the-rankings-work-and-what-we-refuse-to-count.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-the-rankings-work-and-what-we-refuse-to-count.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-the-rankings-work-and-what-we-refuse-to-count.jsonld"}}