Index policy

How the index treats you

SecondDoor publishes a ranking of businesses that did not ask to be ranked. That is only defensible if the method is published, the evidence is attached to every score, and the companies measured have a way in and a way out. This page is the way out, and the terms it is offered on.

Who is in the index

Two kinds of site, and nothing else. Anyone can scan any site and get a report at its own address, but a report is not a ranking, and most scans never enter the index at all.

/Sites from our seed list, drawn from the Majestic Million and filtered to remove infrastructure, CDN and advertising domains.

/Sites whose owner has proved they control the domain and asked to be measured.

/A scan somebody else ran of your site produces a report at its own address. It does not put you in the ranking, and it never has.

Corrections come first, and they are free

If a scan got something wrong, tell us and we will fix it and rescan, at no cost, whether or not you are a customer and whether or not you have an account. Write to privacy@seconddoor.io. We reply within one working day.

/A check that reported something missing when it was there.

/A page the scanner could not reach, recorded as an absence rather than as a refusal.

/A company name, a site classification, or an ownership relationship read wrongly.

A score has a date on it

Every report says when it was taken, because a score is a measurement of a site on a day rather than a permanent judgement. If yours is stale, ask and we will take a fresh one. Sites that have been fixed usually move a long way, and that is the point of measuring at all.

Leaving the index

A verified owner can take their domain out. Nobody has to explain why, and there is no negotiation step where we try to talk you round. What happens next is exact, and it is worth reading before you ask, because part of it cannot be undone.

/The domain leaves the leaderboard, the Door Gap Index, and every comparison and archive page.

/The report address stops resolving. Anything that linked to it is told the page is gone rather than that it never existed.

/The company name, the written analysis, the evidence and any screenshots are destroyed.

/What remains is a row with no name attached, carrying the kind of site it was, the scores, and the month. It has to remain, because if leaving also removed the numbers, every published median would move each time somebody asked, and the index would slowly become a record of the sites that were happy with their scores.

/If you want the numbers gone as well, say so and they go. That is the right of anyone whose domain is personal rather than corporate, and it is available to everybody else on request.

Proving that you own the domain

Because the alternative is a form anybody could use to remove a competitor. Publish one DNS TXT record at _seconddoor.yourdomain.com with the value we give you, then press check. If you cannot reach your DNS, a file at a well-known path works instead.

What we will not do

Remove a finding because it is unflattering. If a check is wrong we will fix it and say so, and if a site has changed we will rescan it. But a score that is accurate and unwelcome stays, and a request to soften one is the one request this page does not honour. That is not stubbornness: a ranking that quietly edits itself for whoever complains is not a measurement of anything, and it would be worth less to the people who rely on it than no ranking at all.

How the scanner behaves while it is there

Documented separately, in full, at /bot. In short: it identifies itself, it obeys the robots.txt rules written against its own name, it never submits a form or creates an account, and a site that disallows it is not scanned and leaves the index.

To start, claim your domain, or write to privacy@seconddoor.io.

Last updated 2 September 2026.