How we decide a rate is good

The question every page answers

Every shopping portal will tell you today's rate. None of them will tell you whether it's worth acting on. That's the whole point of this site: when Nike shows 8% on TopCashback, the number you actually need is "is 8% good for Nike on TopCashback?"

So every rate here is compared against its own history — never against another store, and never against another program's points.

The percentile pill

The little 96th pill next to a rate means: better than 96% of the last 365 days for that exact portal-and-store pair.

Two details make that number trustworthy:

• It's time-weighted. A rate that sat at 4% for 80 days counts 80 times more than a 10% flash that lasted a day. A one-day spike can't distort the year.
• It needs real history. If we've only watched a pair for a few days, we don't show a percentile at all. A "high" needs something to be high against — we wait until there are at least two weeks of observed history before making claims.

ATH is stricter: the highest value we have ever recorded for that pair, not just the trailing year.

What the verdict box does

The verdict box turns those stats into a sentence, always leading with the strongest actionable fact: an all-time high beats an N-day high, which beats "above typical," which beats "about typical." It names the portal and the program every time, and it appends the caveats that matter — a boosted offer that will expire, or a stale reading we haven't confirmed recently.

The honesty rules

A few rules we hold ourselves to, because a percentile claim you can screenshot is a claim we have to defend:

• Native units, always. Airline portals pay miles, card portals pay points, cashback portals pay cash. 3 mi/$ is not "about 4%" — unless you choose a valuation. The optional "Rank by value" view does exactly that, with the assumption shown and editable (e.g. "valuing AA at 1.35¢"). We never silently convert points to dollars.
• Stale stays visible, badged. If a portal hasn't been confirmed within ~2.5× its normal check interval, the rate gets a stale badge with the last-confirmed time — but it stays ranked. Hiding data would be tidier and less honest.
• Provenance on hover. Every number shows the exact text we read on the portal ("10% Cash Back") and when we read it.
• "Up to" means up to. Tiered headline rates keep their up to badge — the fine print doesn't disappear into a bigger font.

Where the data comes from

We read each portal's public store pages on a schedule — most every 6 to 24 hours. The data status page lists every portal we track and when it was last confirmed, including the ones we check by hand weekly. If something looks off on a store you know well, use the Report this rate button on that page: reports land directly in our review queue.

The short version: we do the comparison a careful person would do with a spreadsheet and a year of patience — and then we show our work.