# How the rankings work — and what we refuse to count

> Source: <https://dev.to/rss-atlas/how-the-rankings-work-and-what-we-refuse-to-count-4d6d>
> Published: 2026-08-14 16:57:52+00:00

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.

Anyone can write that sentence, so here is what is actually counted — and, more importantly, what is deliberately not.

| Signal | What it represents |
|---|---|
Favorites |
Someone decided they wanted to come back to it |
Page views |
The feed's detail page was opened |
AI fetches |
An AI tool retrieved the feed over MCP |

These are combined with **time decay**, so recent interest counts for more. A feed read heavily last year sits below one being read this week.

**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.

This is the axis other directories do not have.

Search 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.

This half matters more.

Publishing what you count invites people to manufacture it. AI fetches are the exposed surface, since there is an unauthenticated demo path, so:

None of that is airtight, which is why **AI fetches carry the smallest weight** of the three.

When an AI tool calls `get_rankings`

, what comes back is **purely organic**. The sponsored-placement data is not consulted by that query at all.

The 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.

The [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.

Category and tag rankings work the same way, ordered by the summed score of the feeds they contain.

The 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.