Where our ratings come from
Every IndexFair score is built from genuine user reviews and first-party measurement of the product. We don't accept submissions and we don't take payment for inclusion. We continuously re-evaluate which sources carry real signal — so the categories below are the backbone of our coverage, not an exhaustive list. We deliberately don't publish every source we read, so the score can't be flooded to order. The full derivation lives in the methodology.
Main sources
We read genuine user reviews across these source types, then corroborate them with an independent estimate of each brand's real-world traffic and with our own first-party measurement of the live product (game libraries, market pricing). No single feed can move a score on its own.
Verified-install reviews at scale — the closest thing to a representative cross-section of a brand’s actual users.
Real-time, unsolicited reports — including the unresolved complaints that never reach a formal review platform.
High-volume written feedback, read for the substance of each report rather than the headline star rating.
We extract the real user reviews underneath these pages — never the marketing copy, and never the ranking the site is paid to show.
Sources we deliberately don’t use
Reviews routed through a brand-owned channel cannot be verified for provenance.
We read the genuine user reviews on affiliate and specialist sites, but never the rankings those sites are paid to show or the marketing around them — that output is downstream of someone’s commission.
Forums without account-age or post-history metadata collapse the signal-to-astroturf ratio below useful for the weight algorithm.
Already heavily summarised and slow to update. We aggregate raw user signal directly; secondary editorial layers re-introduce the biases we filter for.
How sources are weighted
Regulator data carries the highest single weight because it represents adjudicated outcomes — a complaint registered with the regulator survived both the operator’s own dispute process and the regulator’s intake filter. Genuine first-hand user reviews sit next, weighted by recency and by how reliably each source has tracked real outcomes over time. An independent traffic estimate corroborates them: sentiment that isn’t backed by a matching audience is trusted less.
General consumer-review platforms get the lowest weight — useful for cross-source validation but too easily flooded to anchor a score on their own. We publish the method, not a per-source scoreboard that could be reverse-engineered and gamed.
Read the full weight derivation in methodology §3 →Methodology coverage
On each market ranking page we show a methodology coverage percentage. This tells you how much of the source set we plan to use for that market we currently have fresh data from — not a per-brand quality signal, a market-level honesty signal.
The source has been refreshed within its scheduled window. Its signal feeds into every brand score in this market.
The source was refreshed more recently than we expect — its data may be slightly stale until the next scheduled run.
We plan to include this source for this market but have not yet wired it up. It does not contribute to scores until it is current.
We show the source category (Regulator, Specialist review, Review platform, Community) and freshness state — not individual source names or weights — so the score cannot be reverse-engineered and gamed.
Sources we plan to add
- 01DE BZGA + GGL regulatory feeds · Phase 2
- 02NL Kansspelautoriteit register · Phase 2
- 03Additional app-store and social locales · Phase 2