NomansiteNews / 31 August 2026
Directories as a list of links, not a source of truth
Award galleries and agency catalogues know thousands of studios we did not. We take from them exactly one thing — addresses to visit — and keep counting for ourselves.
There are directories with more studios than we had: award archives, agency catalogues, portals with tens of thousands of profiles. The tempting move is to copy their lists and inherit their rankings. We did not, and the reason is the whole point of the project.
A directory's ranking is its business model. Import it and you import someone else's incentives; your register becomes a mirror of theirs, including whatever they sell.
What we take instead
Addresses. A directory's portfolio section points at live sites made by real studios — that is a list of pages worth reading. Our crawler visits them, reads the footers, and the signature is counted by the same rule as every other signature on the web. Nothing enters the ranking because a directory said so.
The same discipline applies to the studios themselves: appearing in an agency catalogue puts a domain in the register as a studio, because the platform states it is one. It does not put it anywhere in the ranking. Those are different claims, and mixing them is how a measurement becomes a brochure.