How a listing gets ranked, and what can be moved
No platform publishes its formula. What follows is what can be observed from the outside, measured on real listings.
- 01
What orders the search result
Booking platforms rank on sales signals: how many people who see the listing go on to book, how many reviews there are, how recent they are and what rating they carry. A listing with few reviews rarely climbs, however good the tour is. That is the cold start, and it is the first thing that has to break.
- 02
Why thirty reviews
Willingness to book rises steeply between zero and five reviews. After that it keeps rising, but each new review adds less, and around thirty the curve flattens. Thirty is the point where a listing stops being structurally disadvantaged. Past that number the work moves to price, photos and option structure.
- 03
What we do with reviews, and what we do not
We work the loop that gets a satisfied guest to leave a review: the moment of the ask, the channel, the wording and the reminder. That is the whole of it. We do not buy reviews, write them, trade them or offer discounts for a rating. A bought review gets detected, and when it does the whole listing falls, not the review.
- 04
The three data sources
The material a new listing is built from: the reviews of the best-ranked operators in your city, your own reviews, and the structure of the listings that already work. All three are public and none of them is practical to read by hand, since it runs to thousands of texts per city. That is what the index is for.
- 05
The index
We keep our own index of listings by city and platform, with rank, reviews, price, photos and options, and with history. The history is the part that matters: without it you can describe a market, but you cannot show a change.
Listing radar
Paste the public URL of your activity. We compare your listing with the three best-ranked in your city and category.