Why every number on this site has a date

Look at any number on this site and you will find the date it was measured next to it: "7,055 listings, measured 26 September 2026", "76 games, measured 26 September 2026". It looks fussy. It is the cheapest credibility we know how to buy, and it comes from being burned.

Agency numbers are usually fiction

"500+ happy clients." "10 million visitors." "The leading agency in Bangkok." Nobody can check them, so they mean nothing, and the people you most want as clients have learned to read them as a warning sign. The previous version of this very site had a stats board like that. It claimed a network of eight high-traffic platforms. When we rebuilt the site, none of the eight existed any more. The board was still up.

We are not the only ones. Google's own quality guidelines now single out claims a page cannot support, and its 2026 updates hit sites that leaned on generated praise and unverifiable numbers. A directory we run was one of them; the demotion post has that story.

A number with a date is a different kind of claim

"7,055 listings" is a boast. "7,055 listings, measured 26 September 2026" is a measurement. It tells you it came from a query on a day, it invites you to check whether the number still holds, and it ages honestly: in a year it is either updated or visibly old. It also forces us to keep a source. If we cannot say where a number came from and when, it does not go on the page.

The same rule applies to the things we do not say. There is no client count on this site because we would have to define "client". There are no rankings because we do not control them. There is no average speed score across "all our sites" because that average would hide the slow one.

How we keep it honest in practice

• Every fact on the site lives in a content file with a measured date next to it. The template will not render a number without one.
• Case studies link to the live site, so the claim and the thing it describes sit one click apart.
• A script runs on every build and fails it on words we have banned for ourselves: anything that claims to be the leader, anything that promises a result, anything without a date.
• Numbers we can no longer verify are removed, not softened. "Over 7,000" is a softened number.

Why you should ask your agency for the same

Ask for the date and the source of any number on their site. A good agency has them within a minute. If the answer is a pause, you have learned what you needed to know before the first invoice.