--- title: "How ranking works on Product Billboards, weight by weight · Product Billboards" description: "The organic order is a weighted score recomputed every 24 hours from verified traffic, dwell, geographic spread and founder reply rate. Here is every term in it, and why reply rate is weighted hardest." canonical: https://productbillboards.com/blog/how-ranking-works site: Product Billboards --- Notes # How ranking works on Product Billboards, weight by weight The organic order is a weighted score recomputed every 24 hours from verified traffic, dwell, geographic spread and founder reply rate. Here is every term in it, and why reply rate is weighted hardest. 9 September 2026 By [Shantanu Srivastava](https://productbillboards.com/about), Founder 6 min read Most directories rank by the number of votes a product collected on the day it launched. That number is easy to organise and impossible to audit, and a week later it describes nothing. Product Billboards ranks on a score recomputed every 24 hours from what visitors actually did over a rolling seven-day window. This post is the whole formula. ## The six terms A billboard's raw score is a weighted sum. The weights are constants in the codebase, not per-listing settings, and no amount of money changes them: - **Unique visitors (weight 1)** — distinct sessions that reached the billboard in the last seven days. - **Average dwell (weight 12, capped at 120s)** — how long a visitor held attention on the billboard. A single sample is capped at five minutes so one parked tab cannot dominate the average. - **Geographic diversity (weight 400)** — Shannon evenness across the country codes of those sessions, normalised to 0–1. - **Founder reply rate (weight 900)** — the share of public AMA questions the founder has answered. - **Outbound clicks (weight 3)** — visitors who left for the product itself. - **Questions asked (weight 8)** — how much the billboard provoked people to ask something. ## Why geographic diversity is a term at all It is the cheapest defence against the cheapest attack. Traffic bought from a single origin looks identical to real traffic on a visitor count and nothing like it on a distribution. The measure is Shannon evenness — entropy over the observed country codes, divided by the entropy of a uniform distribution over the same number of countries — so a listing whose traffic is one country scores about 0 and one spread widely scores near 1. Claude Shannon set the definition out in [A Mathematical Theory of Communication](https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf) (Harvard's hosted copy); the [NIST/SEMATECH e-Handbook of Statistical Methods](https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/) is the reference we lean on for the distributional treatment around it. The practical effect: 10,000 hits from one country is worth less than 800 hits from thirty. That is the intended trade. ## Why reply rate is weighted hardest Reply rate carries a weight of 900 — more than twice geographic diversity and nine hundred times a single visitor — because it is the hardest signal in the set to fake. Buying traffic is a credit-card transaction. Answering strangers' questions in public, under your own name, on a thread that stays up, is not something you can outsource cheaply or do insincerely for long. The same logic runs in reverse. Questions left unanswered for more than 48 hours are counted stale, and each one takes 6% off the final score, up to a ceiling of 50%. Sitting on an AMA thread costs position; it does not merely fail to earn it. ## What the daily recompute means for you Rank is a rolling seven-day measurement, so a billboard that stops earning attention slides down over a week rather than being frozen at its launch-day number. There is no decay curve applied on top of that and no age bonus: a listing added today accrues score immediately, with no grace period. ## What cannot move it Paying us. The sponsored slot is a single fixed position — #4 on the home feed, #3 in each category feed — and it is a placement, not a score. It is the only position in a feed that can be bought: every other place, above it and below it, is earned, and none of them are for sale at any price. Every sponsored slot is badged as one. That is covered in full in [Sponsored slots, disclosure, and the one position that is for sale](https://productbillboards.com/blog/sponsored-slots-and-disclosure). Filed under[Ranking](https://productbillboards.com/blog/tag/ranking)[Measurement](https://productbillboards.com/blog/tag/measurement) [← All notes](https://productbillboards.com/blog) · [RSS](https://productbillboards.com/blog/rss.xml)