Governance

Index rules

The question set is public and carries a changelog: every addition, removal and rewording is dated and visible. No payment can put a question into the main set, and no payment can take one out.

This is not a promise, it is a check that runs on every build. The rule that a customer-supplied question cannot enter the published set is enforced by an automated test, and a release that breaks it does not ship.

Entry criteria are published before a category opens: which brands are measured, how they are selected, and what disqualifies one. A brand does not enter because it asked, and does not leave because it complained.

Founder-owned brands

The founder runs a coffee brand, Kahveji, and it appears in the coffee index. Hiding that would be worse than the conflict itself, so three things hold:

• It is labelled founder-owned — disclosed everywhere it appears.
• It is measured by exactly the same protocol as every other brand — same questions, same runs, same parser, no manual adjustment.
• Any case study that uses it says so in the first line, not the footnote.

If a founder-owned brand ever ranks first in its category, we will say plainly why, with the evidence, or we will not publish that ranking.

Rankings are not for sale

No customer can buy a position, a question, or a favourable reading. Customers buy measurement and experiments; they do not buy the result. A customer who scores badly is told they score badly — that is the product working, not failing.

We publish our parser's measured error rates on the methodology page. A ratings agency that hides its error bars isn't one.

Independent review

Today the methodology is reviewed internally, and we are not going to call that independence. As the index grows we will commission an outside methodology reviewer and publish their findings, including the ones we do not like.

[METİN GEREKLİ: bağımsız denetçi taahhüdünün eşiği — hangi ölçekte (müşteri sayısı? yayımlanan kategori sayısı?) devreye girer, ve Kahveji rozet dilinin son onayı]