NomansiteNews / 20 July 2026
What is not a studio
Half of building a register is deciding what to throw out. Website builders, portfolio platforms, brands that hired somebody else — each of them looked exactly like a studio until it didn't.
Any signal strong enough to find studios will also find things that are not studios. The work is in the exclusions, and they are written down as rules rather than as lists of names, because a list of names never ends.
Four kinds of false positive
Builders that sign every installation. Squarespace, Wix, WordPress themes: the footer says the platform, not the maker. And a page at something.business.site is an address on a platform, not a studio's domain — which is why we exclude the platform and everyone living on it in one rule.
Reference works. An encyclopedia article about a company is not the company's site. Mapmakers and registries alike put the article where the website should go, and a foundation's contact page ends up belonging to Wikimedia.
Directories themselves. Studios put award badges in their footers. Without care, an award becomes a studio with thousands of «signed sites».
Clients. Award entries list everyone involved — agency, brand, production — with no roles attached. Left alone, that turns famous brands into prolific web studios, credited with the sites of the very agencies that built for them.
Every one of these was caught in live data, and each fix is a rule that applies to every future source. That is the only way a register stays clean while it grows.