Ownership and funding
Who owns this, who pays for it, and what could bias it. Read it before you weigh anything else on the site.
Who owns it
The Shortlist Report is owned and published by Todd Piechowski, personally. It is not owned by a company, has no investors, no board and no staff. One person decides what gets measured and what gets published.
The interest you should know about
Todd works in AI visibility measurement — the same subject this publication reports on. That is why the method here is any good, and it is also the reason to read the rankings with your eyes open: someone who measures AI visibility for a living is not a neutral party on whether AI visibility is worth caring about.
No firm ranked on this site is a client of that work, and none has been. If that ever changes, the firm gets labelled as such on every page it appears on rather than removed — see the rules below.
The rules
- Nothing is for sale. No firm can pay to appear, to move up, to be described differently, or to be removed. No sponsored placement, no affiliate link, no lead sale, no advertising. If that changes it will be disclosed here and on every affected page before it changes, not after.
- Nothing is sold from these pages. There is no product pitch, no call to action and no form. A reader who wants their own measurement can go and find one; the rankings do not point them anywhere.
- Any conflicted firm gets labelled, not protected. A firm with a commercial relationship to the publisher is marked on every page where it appears. It is not removed and its numbers are not adjusted. The count is the count.
- No firm is contacted before publication. Firms are not told they will appear, are not offered a preview, and are not asked to comment. A ranking a firm helped shape before it ran is not a measurement.
- The question set is fixed before the data comes back. Questions are written and locked before sampling, so none can be dropped for producing an inconvenient answer.
- Unflattering results get published. Including for firms the publisher would rather promote. A list that flatters is a list nobody should read.
- The evidence ships with every report. Not just the counts — the raw answers those counts were taken from, downloadable on every page. You do not have to trust the arithmetic when you can redo it.
How this is paid for
Out of pocket. This publication earns no revenue: no advertising, no placements, no lead sales, no subscription, no sponsorship. It costs money to run and makes none. If a business model ever appears, it will be described here first.
Editorial control
Nobody outside this publication sees a report before it is published, and nobody outside it holds approval over what is published or how a firm is described.
Pages are bylined to The Shortlist Report rather than to an individual, because the rankings are produced by a measurement pipeline and an editorial process rather than by a writer with a view. Naming a person who did not personally count the answers would be the more flattering choice and the less accurate one.
What we do not claim
We do not describe this publication as independent. It is run by one person with working experience in the subject it measures, and the word would be doing more work than the facts support. What we do claim is narrower and checkable from the pages themselves: the rankings are counts, nothing is for sale, nothing is sold from these pages, the method is published, and the underlying answers are downloadable.
Holding us to it
Every rule above is testable from outside. The counts are downloadable, the answers behind them are downloadable, the method is written down, and the questions are printed on the pages they produced. If a number here does not reconcile with the file underneath it, that is something you can establish without our help — and we would like to hear about it.