Method # How we rank The shortlist uses the 2026-11-09 market survey. Commercial rows are ordered on money and adoption. Open-source rows are ordered on GitHub stars. Both are turned into a scale score and a validation score. The survey then blends them. This site does not print the blend. Research 2026-11-09. Page updated 2026-11-11. ## Scale For a commercial row, scale uses the strongest sourced figure among valuation or deal price, ARR or run-rate, funding, and, for coding agents, users. A figure that describes the whole company, rather than the agent, is discounted. For an open-source row, scale is the star count on a log curve from the GitHub snapshot. A commercial product that also has a public repo keeps the higher of the two. ## Validation Validation adds market-map and analyst appearances, fetched pages that name the row, list hits, and named enterprise customers. It is capped. Posts on X can be cited. They are not scored. ## Judgment and the floor Some rows are placed by judgment and labelled on the page. A large vendor with no agent-specific figure can receive a floor so that missing data is not read as small. That floor is a heuristic. Incumbents a buyer already holds can be named for the same reason. The page says which rows those are. ## Evidence tiers - Verified - Verified - Reported - Estimated - Stale - GitHub Every dollar figure and every star count on a shortlist card carries one of these tiers, a date, and a source when one was stored. If the research stored no URL, the card says the source is not linked. A stale date stays visible. Conflicting figures are kept as separate notes. They are not averaged. ## What we do not publish - Blended scores. A score in one category is not comparable with a score in another. - Keyword Planner volumes, bids, and other search-demand numbers. - A dollar amount, user count, or star count that is not in the research files. ## Common questions ### Why is a row on a page? A row is on a page because the research recorded scale or validation for it, or because the page says the row is a judgment placement. ### What is a verification tier? Verified, primary means the company or acquirer page was fetched and the figure is on it. Verified, secondary means a publication or research page was fetched and shows the figure. Reported means the figure came from a search summary or a post and the page was not fetched. Estimated means an aggregator estimate. Stale date means the figure’s own date is old. GitHub snapshot means a star count from the 2026-11-09 snapshot. ### What is not published? Blended scores are not published. They do not compare across categories. Keyword Planner volumes and other search-demand numbers are not published. A missing figure stays missing. [Homepage shortlist](https://www.agentlist.io/) --- Source: [How we rank | agentlist.io](https://www.agentlist.io/methodology). This is the public page rendered as Markdown; interactive controls require the website.