The Robo Index — (algorithm: product_v1)
The Robo Index — How It Works
The Robo Index is a credibility grade — AAA down to C, like a bond rating — recomputed nightly from verified public data. It answers one question: how proven and trustworthy is this robot? Underneath, a 0–100 composite does the math (and powers the ranking); the public headline is the grade. Nothing about it is for sale. Missing data is excluded — never counted as zero — so a real product is never punished for the gaps in our data.
Recomputed nightly. Sourced entirely from public data. Nothing about the ranking is for sale.
Go deeper
The decision model behind the grade
The Robo Index is a single grade. See the full map of entities and relationships — colour-coded by the six questions every buyer asks (fit, evidence, viability, value, adoptability, risk) — and exactly how much of it carries verified data today.
TL;DR
- A letter grade (AAA…C). A credibility band, not a falsely-precise number.
- Skip-and-normalize. Missing data is skipped, never zero-filled.
- Evidence rewards breadth. More verified facts about the robot lift the grade; a thin page sits mid-band rather than cratering.
- Rankings can't be bought. No tier, subscription, or partnership affects your Robo Index.
What Robolist.ai Is — And Isn't
Robolist.ai is a public leaderboard, not a marketplace. We grade the world's robots by an objective, uncapped Robo Index — a credibility score built from verified public signals: how mature and deployed the product is, the company behind it, independent coverage, and how completely its specs are documented. Rankings cannot be bought, claimed, or unlocked by any subscription tier. There is no "partner" path to a higher grade.
We are not a procurement platform. We do not host buyer reviews, broker quotes, or take a cut of transactions. Companies cannot pay to be ranked higher; they can only pay to present themselves more completely on a profile page that every other company already has access to in a free form.
Think CoinMarketCap for robots — an independent, methodology-driven source of truth — not G2, not Thomasnet, not Alibaba. Every robot in our database is ranked by the same formula, whether the company is a Fortune 500 incumbent or a two-person startup that has never heard of us.
Robolist.ai exposes two distinct measures. Conflating them would let our data coverage masquerade as a credibility signal — which it isn't.
Robo Index (public)
Credibility grade
How proven and trustworthy the product is: commercial maturity, deployment footprint, track record, the company behind it, and independent recognition. Shown as a letter grade (AAA…C) on every public robot and company page; drives the leaderboard.
Profile Completeness (dashboard)
Coverage signal
How much of a robot's page is filled in for its category. A motivational metric for owners; never used to rank robots and never shown on public pages. Visible only inside the company dashboard.
The public Robo Index is a letter grade — a credibility band, like a bond rating. It maps from the internal 0–100 in fixed 10-point steps. AAA is reserved for the most thoroughly-evidenced robots (80+), so the top grade is earned, not handed out.
| Grade | Score | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| AAA | 80+ | Exceptional evidence |
| AA | 70 – 79 | Very strong evidence |
| A | 60 – 69 | Strong evidence |
| BBB | 50 – 59 | Adequate evidence |
| BB | 40 – 49 | Speculative — thin evidence |
| B | 30 – 39 | Weak evidence |
| C | under 30 | Minimal evidence |
The grade is the public expression; the underlying 0–100 still drives the exact leaderboard order, so two robots that both grade "A" can still rank in a definite order.
Buyers pick a brand before they pick a model — the way a car buyer settles on Mercedes or BMW before choosing between an S-Class and a 7-Series. The Robo Index above grades an individual robot. Robo Score grades the maker, on six factors, and rolls the robot grades up to the brand. It is additive: it never reorders the robot rankings.
| Factor | Answers | In the rating? |
|---|---|---|
| Products | How good the robots this brand ships actually are, on the same Robo Index used for every robot. | Yes — 45% |
| Range | Whether this is a committed manufacturer with a real product line, or a one-robot outfit. | Yes — 30% |
| Momentum | Whether the brand has shipped or announced something real recently, or has gone quiet. | Shown only |
| Attention | How much independent editorial press is covering this brand right now. Attention, not quality. | Shown only |
| Readiness | Whether the practical integration facts — certifications, software, warranty, lead time — are published. | Shown only |
| Traction | Whether the catalog is commercially shipping, lifted by any verified real-world deployments. | Yes — 25% |
Why only three factors set the number
Momentum, Attention and Readiness all depend on how much we have managed to collect about a company. If we averaged all six and simply skipped the missing ones, a company we know less about would score higher — because its weakest factors would be dropped rather than counted. We measured exactly that: a small startup with no recent press outranked one of the four largest industrial robot makers in the world, purely because the big maker had a real Attention score to average in and the startup did not.
Products, Range and Traction are present for every company in the catalog. They carry the rating. The other three are drawn on the hexagon because they describe the shape of a brand — but they cannot move its number, so no company is ever rewarded for the gaps in our data.
Missing data is grey, not zero
A hollow grey vertex means we have no data for that factor — not that the company scored badly. Traction works the same way: a company's commercial catalog sets a floor, and verified real-world deployments can only ever raise it. We do not hold a missing deployment record against a maker, because the largest robot makers on earth have the fewest such records in our database — a gap in our collection, not in their business.
Attention measures coverage, not quality
Attention counts independent editorial coverage from the last two years, weighted by the outlet. Original reporting counts fully. Syndicated reprints count for very little. Company press releases and newswire distribution count for nothing at all, and five reprints of one announcement count once. A brand being widely written about is a fact about the news, not a verdict on its robots — which is why Attention is shown but never scored.
Claiming a company page, verifying it, or paying for any plan changes none of these six factors. A maker who claims their page may submit genuine press coverage we missed, and that goes through the same review as everything else — the article existed whether or not we had indexed it.
Each factor below either contributes a number 0–100, or is marked absent. The normalized score is the weighted average over present factors only — present weights are renormalized so they always sum to 1. A robot with three strong signals can earn a normalized 70+ even though the other factors are missing.
This replaces the prior approach where missing fields counted as 0, which let our coverage gaps masquerade as quality problems and produced unfairly low scores for legitimate commercial robots. A factor only earns coverage credit (see below) if its computed value is greater than 20 — so filling every field with garbage data does not register as comprehensive.
A grade built from one fact is less certain than one built from many. So the normalized score is scaled by a gentle, floored coverage multiplier: clamp(0.5 + 0.08 × robotSignals, 0.5, 1). Two things matter here. First, the floor never drops below 0.5 and never decays — a thin-but-real page sits mid-band instead of cratering. Second, only robot-specific signals count toward coverage: a company's funding, age, or portfolio describe the maker, not this robot, so a big parent can't buy a higher grade for a lab prototype.
| Robot signals present | Multiplier | Raw 100 → |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.58 | 58 |
| 2 | 0.66 | 66 |
| 3 | 0.74 | 74 |
| 4 | 0.82 | 82 |
| 6 | 0.98 | 98 |
This is data confidence, not platform relationship. An unclaimed robot with strong public evidence grades just as high as anyone else. The math does not know — and does not care — whether a company has claimed its page or has any relationship with Robolist. (This permanent floor replaced an earlier temporary "launch grace" allowance, now retired.)
10 universal-credibility factors. Default weights — a baseline for every category. Buyer-specific attributes that are rarely disclosed (safety certification, SDK / adoptability, pricing, regional availability, user reviews) live in the separate Fit layer, not here. See category tuning below for per-robot-type adjustments.
| Factor | Default weight | Data source |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial maturity | 20% | Commercial status and deployment stage (shipping / pilot / research) |
| Deployment footprint | 18% | Press releases, case studies, customer announcements |
| Proven track record | 12% | Years shipping commercially + reliability specs (MTBF, duty cycle) |
| Spec completeness | 12% | Manufacturer product pages and data sheets (documented & plausible) |
| Company financial health | 12% | Crunchbase, public filings, manual verification |
| Company maturity | 8% | Company founding year (Crunchbase, public filings) |
| Manufacturer portfolio | 6% | Breadth of the manufacturer product line |
| Media mentions (trailing 12 months) | 6% | Industry publications, news aggregators |
| Independent recognition | 4% | Wikipedia / Wikidata presence (third-party notability) |
| Market momentum | 2% | Recent press coverage and newly launched products |
A humanoid and an industrial arm don't share the same buyer criteria. We tune the factor weights per category so each segment is judged by what its buyers actually look at first. The three highest-volume categories on the platform have custom weights; every other category uses the universal defaults above.
| Category | Tuned factors | Why |
|---|---|---|
| industrial arm |
| Integrators compare arms on reach, payload, and repeatability — spec data is load-bearing here. |
| humanoid |
| Mainstream press is a real signal for humanoids; spec sheets are still maturing across the segment. |
| cobot |
| Cobots are bought on safety and ease-of-use as much as raw mechanical specs. |
Tuned weights are renormalized so the vector still sums to 100% across all factors.
Profile Completeness measures how much of a robot's page is filled in for its category. A humanoid's page is “complete” when humanoid-relevant fields (height, payload, battery, onboard compute, hand DOF, …) are populated; an industrial arm's page is “complete” when its core fields (reach, payload, repeatability, controller, IP rating, …) are populated. Universal fields — description, hero image, year, price, availability — count for every category.
It does not affect the Robo Index. Two pages with identical Robo Index scores can have very different completeness percentages. Completeness exists so manufacturers know where to invest their data effort; it is shown only inside the dashboard, never on a public page or the leaderboard.
- Missing signals are excluded from the score, never counted as zero. Sparse pages are not punished for our coverage gaps.
- The Robo Index is uncapped. Claim status, verification tier, and any business relationship with Robolist have zero effect on the score — trust is signaled separately via badges.
- Data loses 2% of its weight per month after 12 months without re-verification.
- Every contributing fact carries a source URL and a scrape timestamp.
- Leaderboard ties break on number of present signals first, name second — a 3-signal real product always ranks above a 1-signal listing at the same numeric score.
- Disputes are handled at support@robolist.ai within 48 hours.
The Robo Index is permanently decoupled from commercial relationships. Premium subscriptions and sponsored placements affect visibility only — sponsored slots on category pages are clearly labeled as “Sponsored” and are the only commercial surface on the site.
No payment, claim, or verification of any kind can move a robot's Robo Index. Grades are computed from public deployment data, commercial maturity, track record, spec documentation, company financials, independent coverage, and company maturity — never from revenue relationships. See our Transparency page for active sponsorships.
Trust signals are separate from the score
The Robo Index reflects product quality based on verified data. It is never influenced by the company's relationship with Robolist. Trust is a separate signal, shown next to the score, with its own badge family across identity, subscription, cohort, and spec axes. See our badge system →
Algorithm product_v1 is a 10-factor credibility model, expressed publicly as a letter grade (AAA…C). It replaces the earlier v1 (4-factor) and v2 (8-factor, zero-fill) approaches. Tier-based caps and the verification factor were removed in 2026-05 to decouple the score from claim status; buyer-specific attributes (safety, SDK, pricing, region, reviews) moved to the separate Fit layer in 2026-06, and the old harsh coverage penalty plus the temporary launch-grace floor were replaced by a gentle, permanent coverage floor. Older snapshots are retained for history; the leaderboard reads each robot's most recent snapshot.