AviaRankMethodology
Every listed website is scored with the same method. All rules are listed below.
What we list
Galleries and communities where enthusiasts upload, share and publicly display aviation photos. News media, personal blogs, flight trackers and aircraft registry sites are not listed at this stage.
Dimensions and weights
| Dimension | Source | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Traffic | Tranco website ranking, averaged over the last 30 days. Tranco is a research ranking that aggregates several popularity lists. | 35% |
| Content | Total number of photos the website publicly displays. | 25% |
| Community | Registered members plus followers of official social media accounts. | 15% |
| Activity | Photos added in the last 30 days. | 15% |
| Longevity & reliability | Domain registration date, or founding year when unavailable; homepage availability over 90 days; HTTPS support. | 10% |
How scores are calculated
- Traffic, content, community and activity values are log-transformed to reduce the effect of very large sites.
- Each dimension is converted to a percentile among all listed websites, from 0 to 100.
- The overall score is the weighted average of the dimension percentiles.
- This week’s score is blended 70/30 with last week’s to avoid sudden swings.
Missing data
When a value is missing, that dimension is left out of the average and the overall score is discounted by completeness: score × (0.5 + 0.5 × completeness), where completeness is the share of weight with data. Missing data never counts as zero, and a site with only a few values cannot rank artificially high. Websites absent from the full Tranco list are placed in the lowest traffic tier rather than treated as missing. When neither a domain registration date nor a founding year is known, longevity is set to the midpoint. Websites protected by anti-bot challenges are counted as online.
Update schedule
Data collection starts every Sunday at 18:00 UTC and a new ranking is published once all websites are processed. Homepage availability is checked daily. Our crawler identifies itself as AviaRankBot and only requests homepages, never photos or other content.
Countries and regions
Websites are assigned to the country or region of their operator or main audience. Country rankings use the same scores as the global ranking, sorted among websites in that country or region.