Why no vendor can pay to rank on NeutralPick

A note on words: on this page, a vendor is a company that sells the product you are looking at, and a buyer is you, the person choosing.

What shapes a software search today

When you search for a kind of business software, the first results are often ads. Companies pay for those places. The search engine decides the order partly by how much each company bids and partly by how relevant it judges the ad to be. So money is not the only thing that decides the order, but it is a real part of it.

Below the ads are the normal results. The pages that appear near the top are often pages a company has spent money and time on: articles, search engine optimisation, and comparison pages the company wrote about its own product.

You will also find many "best software" lists. Some are written carefully by independent people. Others are paid a fee every time a reader signs up through one of their links. As a reader, you often cannot tell which kind of list you are reading.

None of this is secret, and none of it is wrong in itself. But it has two results. First, a small company with a good product and little money for marketing can be very hard to find. Second, the companies a buyer sees first are often the ones that spend the most on being seen, not the ones that fit the buyer best.

NeutralPick's rules

• Every vendor gets the same questions. You write one checklist of questions. Every vendor you add gets exactly that checklist. A vendor can answer it in writing through its own private link. Or, if you have already had a sales call or a product demo with that vendor, you can fill in their answers yourself from what they told you. Either way, no vendor gets easier or different questions.
• You make the decision. NeutralPick shows all the vendors' answers side by side, in one table. It does not choose a winner for you. No vendor can change where its answers appear in your table.
• No paid placement. No vendor can pay to be shown to you, to be shown higher up, to be marked as "featured", or to be highlighted in any way. This is true now, and it will stay true.

The company list

NeutralPick also has a public company list. Its purpose is to help buyers find companies that do not show up near the top of search results. It follows the same rules as the rest of the site.

• Listing is free for every company, always. Any company can add itself to the list without paying anything.
• A listing contains facts only. Each listing shows the company's name, its website, the countries it sells in, the kinds of product it sells, one plain sentence about what it does, and keywords that a buyer might search for. Listings have no logos, no star ratings and no advertising text. Words like "best" and "leading" are not allowed.
• No company gets the top spot. When a buyer is comparing products and several listed companies match what they need, NeutralPick shows those companies in a random order. If many companies match, it shows a random selection of them. The public pages of the list are sorted from A to Z by company name.
• The exchange is open and the same for everyone. To be listed, a company adds a link saying "Listed on NeutralPick" to its own website. In return, buyers can find the company on NeutralPick, and NeutralPick becomes known to more buyers through that link. Every listed company makes exactly this exchange. Adding the link does not buy a better position.

There is one more rule. If a company connected to the people who run NeutralPick is listed, it follows exactly the same rules as every other company: the same free listing, the same facts only, and the same random order. The terms of use say this in writing.

How NeutralPick plans to pay for itself

Today, the only cost of running NeutralPick is the server the website runs on. NeutralPick does not run or pay for any AI of its own, so its costs do not go up each time a visitor uses AI. (Why we made that choice.) Because the cost is small and fixed, the site can stay free for buyers while more people start using it.

Over time, the site should earn enough to pay for itself. If vendors ever pay NeutralPick for anything, it will be for a service, such as help with preparing their answers to buyers' questions. A payment will never buy a vendor a place in front of buyers, a higher position, a badge next to its name, or anything else that changes what a buyer sees. If one vendor pays NeutralPick and another does not, you will see both of them in exactly the same way.

We are writing this down now, publicly, so you do not have to simply trust us later.

What you can check yourself

You do not have to take our word for any of this. You can check it as you use the site:

• Every vendor in your comparison answers the questions you chose, and only those.
• You can add any company you want to your comparison, whether or not it is on the company list.
• You can see every vendor's answer to every question, side by side.

To start, build a checklist and send it to the vendors you are considering.