How this marketplace actually works

1. How position is decided

Rank is your time-weighted verified spend. Each payment counts at full value when made, then halves every 7 days, never falling below 10% of its original value.

• A payment contributes amount x 2^(-days/7), floored at 10%.
• Your total verified spend is never altered — only its weight in the ranking changes.
• This keeps every position reachable so the board stays a live competition rather than a frozen list.
• Refunded payments are subtracted and your position is recalculated.
• Exact ties are broken in favour of whoever reached that amount first.

The exact rule

Listings are ordered by three keys, in this order:

1. Ranking score, descending. Under the current model this is your time-weighted verified spend.
2. The moment you first reached the board, ascending. An exact tie is won by whoever got there first.
3. Listing identifier. A final tie-break so the order is fully deterministic and never varies between page loads.

Because position is derived from these values rather than stored, there is no rank field an administrator could edit. Two people bidding for the same position at the same instant both succeed, and the board simply orders them by what each actually paid.

What it costs to move up

To pass the listing above you, you must reach their verified spend plus the minimum increment:

• Minimum first payment for a new listing: $5
• Minimum increment to pass a position: $1
• Minimum top-up on an existing listing: $1
• Maximum single payment: $5,000,000

So if the listing above you has $10,000 in verified spend, you need $10,001 in total. We always require strictly more than the position you are passing, even in cases where an exact tie would win on the tie-break, because a predictable rule is worth more than a clever one.

The amount you are charged is always recalculated on the server at checkout, because the board can move between the moment you see a price and the moment you click.

2. How payments are verified

Your position changes only after the payment provider confirms the payment directly to us. Specifically:

1. You are sent to the provider’s own hosted checkout. We never see your card.
2. The provider sends us a signed webhook. We verify the signature against the raw request body before reading it.
3. We then ask the provider’s API directly what the state of that payment is, and refuse to proceed unless it independently confirms the capture.
4. We check the amount matches. An underpayment never buys the quoted position.
5. The payment is written to an immutable ledger, your verified spend increases, and the board recalculates — all inside a single database transaction.

Returning to our website after paying proves nothing and moves nothing. That is deliberate: anyone can visit a URL.

Payment providers active on this deployment: Cashfree Payments. Ranking is computed in USD; payments in other currencies are converted at the rate captured at the moment of payment, which is stored on the payment record and never re-derived later.

3. What refunds do to ranking

Refunded money stops counting. When a refund succeeds, the amount is subtracted from verified spend and the board recalculates.

This matters because the alternative is a fraud vector: buy the top spot, hold it through a product launch, then charge back and keep the position. That is not possible here.

Your lifetime spend figure is never reduced — the historical record of what was actually paid stays intact for accounting and audit — but it no longer buys position. Every step is written to the ledger and nothing is silently rewritten.

4. How clicks are counted

Every outbound link goes through a redirector that records the click. Not every recorded click is counted. We exclude:

• Traffic identified as automated, by user-agent and request-header analysis.
• Clicks from the listing’s own owner, while signed in.
• More than 10 clicks from the same visitor on the same listing within an hour.

A visitor counts as unique once per listing per 24 hours. Visitors are identified by a rotating, salted hash that changes every day, so it cannot be used to track anyone over time or correlated with any other dataset.

Excluded clicks appear in your own analytics, labelled as excluded. We show them because hiding them would make our numbers look better and be worth less.

5. How trending is calculated

Trending measures movement, not size. A listing with a small budget that is climbing fast can out-trend a listing that has spent far more and is standing still.

Over a rolling 7-day window, each factor is normalised to a 0–1 range and then weighted:

• Spend velocity (35%) — Verified spend added in the last 7 days, log-scaled so proportional growth matters more than absolute size.
• Rank movement (30%) — Positions gained in the window, measured against the earliest ranking snapshot inside it.
• Click growth (20%) — Counted outbound clicks in the window. Bot traffic and self-clicks are excluded before counting.
• Recency (10%) — How recently the listing had any verified activity. Decays linearly across the window.
• New entrant (5%) — A small bonus for a listing that received its first verified payment inside the window.

• Every factor is normalised to a 0-1 range before weighting, so no single factor can dominate through raw magnitude.
• Trending is recomputed on a schedule, not on every request, so the list is stable enough to be readable.
• Trending position cannot be purchased. Sponsored placements are labelled and shown separately.

6. Sponsored placements

Homepage takeovers, category sponsorships and featured slots are separate paid products. They are always labelled and they are never mixed into the earned leaderboard.

This is not a courtesy. The earned board only has value if nobody can mistake a purchased slot for a position somebody competed for. Blurring the two would destroy the thing we are selling.

7. What “verified” means

A Verified badge means the listing owner proved control of the destination domain, by DNS record or by placing a file at a URL we specified.

It means nothing else. It is not an endorsement, not a quality rating, not a statement that the business is reputable, and not a legal or governmental accreditation of any kind.

8. Badge rules

Every badge is awarded automatically by a published rule:

• Biggest Mover — Gained 25 or more global positions from a single verified payment.
• Category Champion — Currently holds position #1 in a category with at least 5 active listings. One badge per category.
• Country Leader — Currently holds position #1 in a country with at least 5 active listings.
• Early Adopter — One of the first 500 listings to receive a verified payment on Outranked.me. Permanent.
• Fastest Riser — One of the 10 largest gains in global rank over the last 7 days, among listings that were already ranked 7 days ago.
• Global #1 — Currently holds position #1 on the global leaderboard. Awarded automatically and removed automatically the moment another listing takes the position.
• Most Clicked — One of the 10 highest counted-click totals in the last 30 days. Bot traffic and self-clicks are excluded from the count.
• Top Advertiser — One of the 25 highest lifetime verified spends across the whole marketplace. Based on lifetime spend, so it is unaffected by ranking decay.
• Verified — Ownership of the destination domain has been proven by DNS record or a file placed at a URL we specify. Not an endorsement of the business.

9. Moderation

Destination URLs are validated before a listing is created and re-checked periodically. We refuse links to private network addresses, non-HTTP protocols, credential-bearing URLs and domains on our blocklist.

Listings promoting phishing, malware, scams, impersonation or illegal services are removed. A removed listing loses its position; any verified payment attached to it is eligible for refund under the refund policy.

Moderation removes listings. It never reorders them, because moderation that could quietly change position would be indistinguishable from a rigged board.

10. What we will not do

• Move a listing up or down by hand, or on request, or for payment outside the board.
• Create fake listings, fake bids, fake users or fake activity.
• Count bot traffic or a listing owner’s own clicks.
• Publish an invented statistic, testimonial or review.
• Present a sponsored placement as an earned position.
• Claim that paying us affects any other company’s search results.

One clarification, because the list above used to say something slightly stronger than the software could guarantee. Position changes when verified spend changes, and verified spend can increase in exactly two ways: a payment confirmed by a payment provider, or platform credit being spent by an Auto-Outrank rule. Credit is issued by us — for example to settle a service failure — and every issuance is written to the same ledger as a payment, as a credit_grant entry, with the reason attached.

So credit-funded spend is real value we have already accounted for, not a number typed into a ranking field. It is also visible: every bid records whether it was funded by credit, and the total is published below rather than left for you to take on trust.

11. What your payment buys

Payment on Outranked.me buys a position on Outranked.me. It does not guarantee Google rankings, mentions by AI assistants, traffic, leads, sales, conversions or business outcomes of any kind. Anyone who tells you otherwise — including us — is wrong.

Questions about any of this? Ask us, or read the terms, refund policy and advertising policy.