How a TractionAtlas report is made

A TractionAtlas report is not an article about a company. It is 122 fields, each with its own definition, its own sources and its own coverage state. That structure is the product, and it is what makes two companies comparable.

Eight modules

Every report is organised the same way, in this order:

1. Users and positioning — who the product is for and how it describes itself
2. Product experience — what the thing actually does, screen by screen
3. Business model — pricing, packaging, what is free and what is not
4. Performance and background — revenue, traffic, team, funding, history
5. Acquisition and growth — where the visitors come from and what changed
6. Feedback and problems — what users complain about, in their own words
7. Practices and resources — what this business does that others could copy
8. Related products — the neighbours, and how they differ

Because the order never changes, you can open two reports side by side and read the same field in both.

Sourced or absent

The rule that shapes everything else: a field we could not source is marked as not researched, not filled in.

This sounds obvious and it is surprisingly rare. It is always possible to write a confident paragraph about a company's onboarding flow without having seen it. We would rather ship a report with visible gaps than one where you cannot tell which sentences were checked.

Each figure also carries a label:

• Company-reported — the business published this number itself
• Model estimate — derived from third-party traffic or directory data

The two are never averaged together, and the label travels with the number wherever it appears.

Drafted by an agent, checked by a person

A research agent gathers the public material — the site as it stands, pricing pages, directories, changelogs, review threads, traffic data — and drafts each field against its definition. An editor then reviews before anything is published. The agent is fast and thorough; the editor is what makes the sources mean something.

Dated, never overwritten

A new version is a new report, not an edit. The old version keeps the pages, the sources and the analysis exactly as they were on the day it was published.

That matters more than it sounds. A pricing page from March is evidence. If we overwrote it in September, the only thing left would be the current price, and the interesting part — that it changed, and when — would be gone.

It is also why an unlock is permanent and belongs to a specific version: buying September never takes March away from you.