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Methodology for Open Source Rank Trackers

This document describes how projects are discovered, reviewed, compared, and kept current. Back to the comparison.

Evidence protocol

Every comparison cell uses a public evidence set declared before evaluation; private sources and maintainer-only knowledge are excluded.

Maturity is calculated mechanically, in this order:

  1. archived repositories are Legacy;
  2. repositories with no releases or less than three months of history are Experimental;
  3. repositories older than twelve months, with at least one release and a commit in the last six months, are Mature; and
  4. all others are Active.

Preview is intentionally not used because it has no objective equivalent in the stored GitHub data.

A weekly workflow refreshes project metrics and checks source links. Metric dates change only when a stored value or its source changes. CI rejects generated files that do not match their data sources.

Versioned discovery runs

Each column is one discovery corpus. Starting another run adds a column instead of rewriting the earlier funnel. Candidate membership is recorded per run, and each human decision identifies the run against which it was made.

Metric 2026-07-30 (active)
Filters evaluated 2026-07-30
GitHub topics 3
Full-text queries 6
Repositories discovered 1,073
Passed mechanical filters 154
Passed content filters 124
Pending review 70
Human decisions 54
Pending verification 0
Included 20
Table-ready 4
Excluded 34
Legacy 0
Known-positive search recall 7 / 8
Known-positive filter recall 8 / 8

Human review proceeds by stars descending. The configured stop rule activates after 50 consecutive resolved decisions without an inclusion; pending verification neither advances nor resets that counter.

Archived repositories are removed from the automatic review queue. A legacy classification therefore requires an explicit manual review or seed.

Discovery sources

Counts overlap because one repository may match several discovery sources.

Metric 2026-07-30 (active)
topic:rank-tracking 39
topic:keyword-tracker 9
topic:rank-tracker 49
query:rank-tracking-phrases 877
query:search-position-phrases 73
query:seo-tools-rank-tracker-readme 58
query:seo-tools-rank-tracking-readme 58
query:self-hosted-seo-rank-tracker-readme 23
query:keyword-position-checker-readme 28
seed:seopanel/Seo-Panel 1

Explicit seeds are stored with their reason in each discovery-run snapshot and are excluded from search recall.

Automated filters

Metric 2026-07-30 (active)
Automatically filtered 949
Stopped at mechanical stage 919
No OSI license detected 871
gsc-only 3
legacy-unmaintained 202
no-osi-license-detected 717
no-rank-tracking-signal 27

Mechanical filters use GitHub's archived status, detected license, and last push date. A repository is stale after 24 months without a push. No OSI license detected means GitHub did not identify an OSI-approved license; it does not prove that no license exists.

Content filters use explicit, versioned patterns over repository descriptions and READMEs. Repository searches are date-partitioned when GitHub reports more than 1,000 results.