How the stumble works
Browse the live directory, try Stumble, or suggest a business. All submissions require editorial review. The reference material below describes the published standard; it is not evidence that an individual business has been checked. No public dataset export or automated check log is offered.
The selection rules behind the discovery surface, published in full: what is eligible, what is weighted, what is deliberately not weighted, and the one thing that can never enter the calculation.
Why this page exists at the same time as the surface
A discovery tool that does not publish its selection rules is asking you to trust an ordering you cannot see. That is the exact mechanism by which listing sites become saleable, and publishing the rules on a later date than the tool would be publishing them after the habit had formed.
So these rules specify the surface, not after it, and any change to them is recorded rather than made quietly.
Step one: eligibility
Only public, published directory entries with valid public website links enter the draw. Editorial approval applies the entry bar. Read each listing for its actual evidence, check date, limitations, and ownership disclosure; publication is not a real-time verification signal.
Editors must unpublish stale, disputed, closed, or removal-requested entries to remove them from discovery. The current system does not automatically apply a check-log or staleness threshold. Reloading discovery refreshes the public pool.
Step two: the draw
A uniform random selection from the eligible pool. Not weighted by recency, popularity, category, click behaviour, entry age, or anything about the business.
The curation is upstream. By the time the draw happens, every decision that matters has already been made by a person applying a published bar, which is why the draw itself can afford to be dumb.
Step three: repetition
The discovery page keeps the seen-entry set in page memory only. It resets on reload or close, assigns no reader identifier, avoids repeats until a round is exhausted, and then starts a new round.
What can never enter the calculation
- Money, in any form. No paid placement, no sponsorship, no boost, no priority — and no field in the record structure that could carry one.
- Any relationship between us and the business beyond the entry itself.
- Any publisher-owned property whose ownership relationship is not prominently disclosed.
- Any profile of you, inferred or supplied.
- Any rating, score or quality judgement, because none exists anywhere on this site.
The discovery surface has no field for ratings, payment, profiling or untraceable evidence, and money cannot change what it shows — see who pays for this.
The outbound link
- It points at the operator's own destination, directly.
- No interstitial, no countdown, no 'you are leaving' page.
- No tracking redirect that obscures where the link goes.
- No frame, wrapper or reader mode around the destination.
- Standard safety attributes on the link, and nothing else.
Accessibility rules
- Every action reachable and operable by keyboard.
- Nothing auto-advances or refreshes on a timer.
- Focus is never trapped inside the surface.
- Motion is optional and respects the reader's system preference.
- The next-entry action is a real control with a real accessible name, not a decorated area of the page.
A conforming discovery tool must provide keyboard access, explicit controls, no automatic advance and a bounded crawl surface. The discovery page implements the draw; this page documents it.
How you would notice a change
A 'featured', 'sponsored' or 'promoted' label anywhere in the surface. An entry appearing far more often than chance would explain. A rating or a tier appearing on any record. Publisher-owned properties appearing without a clear ownership disclosure or receiving preferential treatment. An interstitial between the click and the destination.
Any of those would mean these rules had changed without this page changing. Read the correction procedure at corrections.
Questions about the rules
Is a uniform draw not a bit crude?
Yes, deliberately. Any weighting is a judgement about which businesses deserve more attention, and once that judgement exists it becomes a scarce position — which has a price whether or not anyone intends to charge one.
Why exclude stale entries from the rotation but not from the register?
Because the register is something you chose to browse, with the flag visible; the stumble is something we hand you. We should not hand you an entry we are no longer confident about.
What exactly is stored in my browser?
The discovery page keeps the seen-entry set in page memory only. It resets on reload or close, assigns no reader identifier, avoids repeats until a round is exhausted, and then starts a new round.
Can a business ask to be excluded from the rotation but stay in the register?
Yes. Ask at corrections. Being findable and being handed to strangers at random are different things, and it is reasonable to want one without the other.
Do you count clicks?
Anything we count is stated on this page and in the cookie policy. Nothing counted feeds back into the rotation — the draw does not know what anyone clicked.
Will there ever be categories or filters in the stumble?
Possibly, as a way of narrowing the eligible pool before the draw. What will not appear is an ordering within it, because that is the part that becomes saleable.
These rules document the current discovery implementation and any change to them is recorded before it takes effect.