How we rank websites for sale without trusting the headline

Every acquisition listing is written to sell. That does not make it misleading, but it does mean the asking price, earnings claim, and growth story should be treated as inputs—not conclusions.

Our daily process starts by making listings comparable. We normalize asking price, monthly revenue, monthly profit, age, and implied annual profit multiple before any qualitative ranking happens.

A polished score can create false confidence. We first reject records missing the financial fields needed for a useful comparison, flag implausible margins, and separate provider-verified metrics from seller claims and calculated values.

• Revenue, profit, and asking price must be present.
• Margins and multiples must pass basic plausibility checks.
• Freshness and source provenance affect evidence confidence.
• Missing facts become visible risk flags rather than optimistic assumptions.

Software is cheaper to reproduce than it used to be. Our build estimate assumes a capable AI-native founder using coding models, hosted services, and APIs—not an agency billing months of manual development.

That makes code a relatively small part of the decision. Customers, repeatable revenue, retention, trusted brand, proprietary data, and operating knowledge carry most of the weight.

The shortlist is designed to reduce a large search space to a manageable research queue. It cannot verify bank statements, customer concentration, source-code ownership, churn cohorts, contracts, or seller identity.

Use our analysis to decide what deserves deeper diligence. Never use it as a substitute for that diligence.