In short: there is no application and no fee. A brand gets on the Census100™ by being named often by AI engines when buyers ask for recommendations in its category, and by having a website that search engines can crawl.
1. Your category is covered
The list is built one product category at a time. The first five are project management, CRM, help desk, email marketing and social media management software. To suggest a category, contact us.
2. Your brand is on the category's brand list
Each category has a list of brands that answers are checked against, published with its results. If your brand is missing, tell us and we will check whether the engines name it.
3. You pass the entry bar
In the same month's CensusIndex™, your robots.txt has to let Googlebot and Bingbot in, and your home page must not be marked noindex. If your firewall turns our crawler away, that is reported but does not count against you. Your brand also has to be named in at least three answers. A link to your site without your brand’s name does not count. A brand that would rank but misses the entry bar is shown as not eligible, with the reason, so you can see what to fix.
4. AI engines name you
Brands are ranked by the share of answers that name them as an option, a recommendation or an example. A mention as something to avoid does not count. Up to 10 brands are listed per category, each with a range, and brands whose ranges overlap are shown as level.
What does not help
- Paying. There is no paid place, and no paid way to change a place.
- Asking us to list you. We report what the engines say.
- Tactics nobody has tested. The CensusIndex grades every check by its evidence, and untested tactics such as llms.txt never count toward a result.
Check where you stand
You can ask for your site's CensusIndex results, and our free tools help you measure how AI engines answer questions about your category.