Methodology
How we rank
An independent reference for AI models, apps and tools. This page explains how the rankings are put together, what we don’t do, and how to tell us we’ve got something wrong.
What we don’t do
No position in a ranking is for sale.
No paid placement
No position in a ranking is for sale, and no entry is sponsored.
No affiliate links
We don’t earn anything when you sign up for a tool listed here.
No links for sale
Every external link on the site is nofollow, so it passes no ranking benefit.
If we run advertising or sponsorship in future, it will be labelled and kept separate from the rankings.
How the rankings are made
Each page pulls together the public evidence, from what vendors report and what the benchmarks show to what reviewers and users are saying.
- Vendor resultsA company’s own figure, reported as that company’s claim.
- Published benchmarksScores on standard public tests.
- Independent evaluationsThird-party measurement, used over vendor figures where it exists.
- Hands-on testingUsing the product for real work.
- Expert reviewsSpecialist reviewers and practitioners.
- User ratingsAggregate ratings from the people using it.
Terminal-Bench 4.0Claude Opus 5.5
We use 59.6%
- Independent measurement (Artificial Analysis), 59.6%
- Anthropic’s own figure, 66.4%, reported as its claim
Disagreement is shown
Where sources disagree, and on benchmarks they often do, the page says so instead of picking the best-looking number.
Claims are labelled
A figure measured on a company’s own test set is reported as that company’s claim.
Facts are linked
Every fact links to its source, so you can check it yourself.
Pages go out of date
Every page shows when it was last updated, and is accurate as of that date. Prices change, models get superseded, free tiers disappear. Check the date.
| Page | Last updated | Age |
|---|---|---|
| Best AI Models | 8 Oct 2026 | 1 day |
| Best AI for Coding | 8 Oct 2026 | 1 day |
| Best AI Image Generator | 8 Oct 2026 | 1 day |
| Best AI for Writing | 8 Oct 2026 | 1 day |
| Best AI for Transcription | 26 Jun 2026 | 3 months |
| Best AI Music Generator | 21 Jun 2026 | 4 months |
We go back to pages as things change, starting with the ones that move fastest. A page written in June may describe something that no longer exists by September.
For vendors
Something out of date?
If a price, feature or claim about your product is wrong, and a public source shows the correct version, tell us.
Send the page and a link to your pricing page, documentation or changelog. We check every one against the public source and fix what is wrong. We also correct facts ourselves when we find them out of date.
listings@theairankings.comNot public yet?
We only consider it from an email address on your company’s own domain.
Anything we use from it is published as your statement, attributed to your company and dated. Never as our own finding.
- 1You send the page and the public source.
- 2We check it against that source.
- 3We fix what’s wrong. The rank is still ours.
Everything else
hello@theairankings.com- Something looks wrong
- Tell us the page and what you think is wrong, and we’ll check it against the sources.
- A tool we should list
- Yours or someone else’s. We look at it against the same evidence as everything else on the page. No fee, and no guarantee.
- Partnerships
- And anything else.