Index changelog — what changed, and when
A ranking that changes without saying why is not evidence. This page records every change to the Local Digital Visibility Index — new cohorts, methodology revisions, scoring corrections and coverage improvements — so that a firm whose score moves can tell whether the firm changed or the ruler did.
Each dated open-data snapshot is tagged in the pipeline repository, so any figure published here can be recomputed from the data as it stood that quarter.
27 August 2026 — Q3-2026 release: all six pillars, seven indices
Section titled “27 August 2026 — Q3-2026 release: all six pillars, seven indices”Measured 27 August 2026. Seven indices, 79 businesses, all six pillars live for the first time: Speed & Core Web Vitals (20%), Technical (20%), Local presence (20%), Visibility (15%), AI search presence (15%), Content & trust (10%).
- Local presence coverage improved from 7 of 18 firms to 17 of 18 in the Bristol estate agent cohort, after three successive matching passes. One Cheltenham firm remains unmatched and is excluded from that pillar rather than scored at zero.
- Weights are renormalised per business across the pillars actually measured for that business, and the effective weights are published in each dataset. A missing pillar never advantages a firm.
- Data published under CC BY 4.0 — reuse permitted, including commercially and in AI answers, with a named credit.
Structural changes shipped the same day, with no effect on any score:
- Every pillar row on all 79 scorecards now links to the knowledge-base article explaining what that pillar measures, and each scorecard carries a Where to get this fixed section naming that firm’s lowest-scoring pillars among those we publish remediation guidance for.
- The glossary was re-framed. It had been presented as a standalone catalogue of statistical methods, which misdescribed its relationship to the index. Scoring uses plain arithmetic by design — ratios, weighted sums, a clamp — so that any published figure can be recomputed without trusting a model. The glossary is the companion toolkit for analysing published data, not the thing that produces it, and now says so.
- Structured data consolidated onto a single author and publisher entity. Generated index pages had been declaring an organisation that no other page on the site declared.
- Measurement date corrected.
measuredAthad been derived from the time the scorer ran rather than the time the data was collected, so re-running the scorer over unchanged data moved the stated measurement date. It is now taken from the collection timestamps, including the index-level geo-grid and intent sidecars. - One knowledge-base article and four other pages linked to a blog post that was never migrated from WordPress. Repointed.
22 June 2026 — six further South West indices (v0)
Section titled “22 June 2026 — six further South West indices (v0)”Bath, Swindon, Exeter, Cheltenham, Gloucester and Bristol dentists published as Q2-2026 v0 — a partial release measuring fewer than six pillars, with the measured subset and renormalised weights stated on each page.
20 June 2026 — index launched
Section titled “20 June 2026 — index launched”The methodology, the index hub and the collection pipeline published. The first cohort, Bristol estate agents, followed on 22 June as Q2-2026 v0.
How corrections work
Section titled “How corrections work”If a figure here is wrong, it gets fixed and the change is logged on this page with the date. Request a correction with the business name and what you believe is inaccurate.
Scores are never adjusted on request. The methodology is applied identically to every business in a cohort, including businesses that ask.