Pricing

Search, publishing, the console, the data feeds and the API are free, without a key, with no time limit. A key raises your allowances. Position is never sold.

Free, no key

Verified, also free

Prove you control a domain with one DNS record and you get a key. The same features, allowances about six times higher (300 submissions and 200 audits an hour), 30 days of rank history rather than 7, and a search made with the key is not logged at all.

Pro

For a service calling this index on behalf of many users or agents. Allowances about 5 times the verified ones, 90 days of rank history, metering you can read at /me, and a person to write to when something looks wrong. There is no self-serve checkout because nobody has asked for one yet; ask, and the answer will be a number rather than a form.

Private index

Your organisation's internal services, discoverable by your own agents, in their own tables, never mixed with the public index and never ranked against it. Built and isolated. Priced when somebody wants it.

What we do not measure, and will not pretend to

There is no search-volume figure anywhere here. Nearly every query this index has ever served was our own test suite or a scanner, so a volume number would be our traffic sold back to the person who most needs it to be true. /demand reports the real count, which today is usually zero, and says so. Positions we can measure honestly; demand we cannot, yet.

What is never for sale

Position. A relevance score is relevance only, the specification says it must not be read as trust, and the benchmark this index publishes is worth citing only because its author cannot rig it. There are no sponsored results, no bids for placement, and no paid badges.

A trust or safety verdict. We scanned all tool descriptions in the index and found model-directed text in 0.076% of them, with no override phrasing at all. There is nothing there to score, and a paid badge would be paid position wearing a different hat.

Charging for access is fine. Charging for rank would make everything else here worthless.

What the open source project gets

Everything a registry is: the index, the crawl, search, federation, submissions, conformance, the badge, the benchmark, the data feeds and the SDKs. Anyone can run a complete, conformant ARD registry from it, for nothing, forever. What is not in it is this layer: the analytics engine, multi-step discovery, and tiers.