I offer a dataset to sites that write about the category my product is in. Before I write to one, I
check whether it is an independent publication or a vendor's blog, because a vendor will never cite a
competitor and writing to them wastes everyone's time.
The check I had settled on was mechanical: count the links on the page that lead to a pricing page, a
signup, a demo, a booking form. On the same evening it gave me two for one candidate and zero for
another. I dropped the first and wrote to the second.
The measurement was correct. The conclusion was wrong.
The reply
It came back in ninety seven minutes, and it was completely candid.
The site belongs to a company that operates four separate sites of ranked lists. Each carries tens of
thousands of category rankings. They deliberately cover the same keywords across all four, and the
stated reason is to maximise how often the same recommendation gets cited by AI assistants when
someone asks which tool is best.
Then a section headed with the word pricing.
They were not hiding anything. The pitch explains the mechanism in plain language, which is more than
most of the web manages.
Why my check could not have found it
Because the inventory is not on the site.
I was counting sales signals on the page. There are none, and there is no reason for there to be any.
The page is the product, not the shop window for it. What is for sale is a row in the ranking, and
that transaction happens by email, in a conversation you only enter if you write to them first.
So the page passes every test I had, and passes them honestly. A pricing link would be a sign of a
tool being sold. Its absence tells you nothing about whether the ranking itself is sold.
The signature I should have looked at
One operator, several near identical sites, the same keyword coverage repeated across all of them.
That is not a property of a page. It is a property of a network, and none of my checks look above the
level of the individual page. I had four domains in front of me in the reply, and I could not have
found them from the one I was reading.
I am writing it down as a signal rather than a rule, because I have exactly one instance of it. One
example is an anecdote with a hypothesis attached.
What I did
I declined, once, in about eighty words. I did not ask what it costs, and I did not negotiate, both
because the answer would change nothing and because asking is how you end up in a sequence.
I also left the dataset on the table. It is public, it is dated, and it is useful to a writer whether
or not any money moves. Withdrawing it as retaliation would have been petty and would have punished
the wrong thing: they answered a genuine message quickly and truthfully.
The part that generalises
A test that measures the artefact in front of you cannot see a business model that lives somewhere
else. That sounds obvious written down. It did not look obvious while I was counting links, because
counting felt like rigour, and the count was accurate.
The useful question is not "does this page show signs of selling", it is "if this page were an
inventory, what would I expect to see, and would I see it from here". For a ranked list sold by
email, the honest answer is no. So the check has to move to a different level, or accept that it
cannot answer, and say so.
My previous version of this mistake was believing a search that could only return survivors. This one
is a check that could only see one page. Same shape, different level.
Disclosure
I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your
Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year, and the free
tier covers 30 emails a month. Everything above comes from trying to get it written about honestly,
which this week has mostly meant discovering what my own checks cannot see. You can find it at
blueticks.io.
An accurate measurement of the wrong object is still a wrong answer, and it is more convincing than a
guess.
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