Methodology
How we research, score, and quality-gate every guide we publish.
Research Process
Every city goes through a structured research phase before any content is generated. We query multiple data sources for the same city — transit authority timetables, official tourism data, real-time pricing for hotels and tours, government visa requirements, and verified review data from booking platforms.
We don't source from aggregator blogs or travel review sites as primary sources. If we can't verify a claim against an official or authoritative source, we don't publish it.
All prices are dated. If a price was verified in Q4 2025, that's what we record — and we flag it as needing refresh after 90 days for most price categories, 180 days maximum before we hard-block republishing.
Scoring Formulas
We compute five proprietary scores per city, each weighted for a specific traveler type. Scores are computed from structured data — not editorial judgment. The formulas are documented here so you can audit them.
restaurant_density × 0.30 + walkability × 0.25 + sunset_spots × 0.20 + ambiance × 0.25 Sunset spots are scored by time specificity, accessibility without reservations, and average crowd level at the optimal time window.
crime_data × 0.40 + lighting × 0.20 + tourist_police × 0.20 + incidents × 0.20 Night-specific scores. Crime data sourced from government reports. Tourist police presence verified from official tourism authority listings.
free_attractions × 0.30 + price_rating × 0.50 + budget_eats × 0.20 Free attraction score weighs the number of genuinely free attractions against their visit worthiness — not just open public spaces.
stroller_access × 0.35 + kid_attractions × 0.35 + family_dining × 0.30 Stroller accessibility verified from official museum and transit authority sources. Not crowd-sourced.
coworking_density × 0.35 + wifi_speed × 0.20 + rental_cost × 0.25 + community × 0.20 Wifi speeds measured in Mbps from coworking space listings. Rental costs sourced within 90 days from verified listings platforms.
Quality Gate
Every page goes through a multi-check quality gate before it's published. A page that fails the gate is flagged for review or blocked entirely — it never goes live as-is.
The gate checks:
- Prose similarity: variant pages must be below 55% Jaccard similarity to the hub page. Pages that are too similar to existing pages are flagged as potential duplicate content.
- Required fields: category-specific fields must be present and non-null. A couples page without romance scores doesn't publish.
- Hard blocks: placeholder links, "it depends" answers where a verdict is required, stale price data over 180 days, and generic packing lists without destination-specific reasoning are all hard-blocked.
- FAQ minimum: every page requires a minimum of 8 FAQ pairs with specific numbers in the answers. Generic FAQ answers ("It depends on your budget") are blocked.
- Affiliate link compliance: every outbound affiliate link must have
rel="nofollow sponsored noopener noreferrer"andtarget="_blank". Missing attributes block publishing. - Content quality scoring: pages are scored on named venues per page, sections opening with specific data points, and absence of vague language ("amazing", "wonderful", "magical"). Pages below the threshold score get regenerated once before being flagged for human review.
Affiliate Influence Policy
Affiliate commissions do not influence rankings, recommendations, or editorial decisions. Tours are ranked by review count, rating, and relevance to the traveler type — not by commission rate. Hotels are filtered by traveler-type fit criteria before any affiliate consideration.
We document our ranking methodology visibly on Best-Of list pages (Group E) — criteria weights that add to 100%, items that nearly made the list and why they didn't, and which items carry affiliate links. See any best-of page for examples.
Data Sources
- Visa requirements: official government embassy pages, EU official portal (ec.europa.eu for Schengen)
- Transit times: official rail and transit authority timetables (SNCF, RATP, etc.)
- Opening hours: official venue websites, verified quarterly
- Tour ratings: GetYourGuide, Viator — minimum 40 reviews required, 200+ for featured placement
- Hotel pricing: Booking.com verified pricing data
- Coworking data: direct coworking space listings and wifi speed verifications
- Safety data: government crime statistics, official police and tourism authority reports