How Take the Market works
The rules every page follows: who writes it, how its facts are checked, how its numbers are computed, and what happens when one of them changes.
Who writes, and how AI is used
Pages are written by the Take the Market Desk, which uses AI models to find sources, read them and draft. Lila Odinaev is the editor and is responsible for what is published. No page carries an invented author: the byline is the desk, and the editor is named.
How facts are checked
Every factual sentence is checked against a passage on a source page that was read for that page. Each page lists its sources at the end and links them where they are used. A sentence that cannot be matched to a passage is cut.
How numbers are computed
Numbers are computed in code from the sources, never typed from memory. Calculators show their formula and a worked example, so a reader can redo the arithmetic by hand. Benchmarks give the median and the middle half of reported results when the source publishes them, and say so when it does not.
How a benchmark median is reported
median = middle value of the reported results, sorted
- middle half
- 25th to 75th percentile, when the source gives them
- n
- how many companies or responses the source counted
Dates and revisions
Every page shows the day it was first published and, when a fact changes, the day it was updated. Dates are never set earlier than the day a page was published. When a number is revised, the old value stays on the page, struck through in red, next to the new one and the date of the change.
Corrections
Errors of substance are corrected on the page and logged on the corrections page with the date, the old wording or number and the new one.
The agency directory
Agencies are listed alphabetically or by the reader's filter. No agency pays to be listed, placement and order are never sold, and there are no scores or rankings. Facts come from each agency's own pages and carry the date they were checked; notes on who an agency fits are labelled as opinion. Each entry is checked against passages on the agency's own pages and re-checked about once a month. The full rules, and how an agency claims or corrects its entry, are on how the agency vault works.
Voices
A Voices entry records that a person on our people list said something useful in public, where and when, with our one-line label and our take. It never reproduces what they said: no post text and no quotes, only a link to the original. Posts from X and LinkedIn load only when a reader clicks to show them.
A post is kept only when four things hold: it makes a specific claim (a number, a mechanism, a step, a before and after, or a named trade-off); a reader at another company could apply it; it is the author's own observation or work rather than a repost, an announcement or a question; and it does not promote the author's employer beyond facts about their own work. Two separate model passes must agree. The role and company shown next to a name come from our own people list, after the role was read on a public page; when a role has not been confirmed, no role line is shown. Anyone with an entry can ask for it to be removed, and it will be.
How we write our take
The take is the editors' opinion, marked as such on every entry. It is written in our words from what we could read of the original (a search excerpt, the full text of an article or episode page, or a curator's note), which we do not store. Each take passes two checks before it is published. Rules in code come first: three to six sentences, no figures, no quotation, no run of five words copied from the original, no names and no hype. Then a second model call compares the take with the text it was written from and refuses anything that text does not support; a refused take gets one rewrite and a fresh check, and is dropped if it fails again. The line under each take says what it was written from.
The newsletter
Take the Market has one weekly newsletter, sent through Buttondown, a newsletter service. The sign-up form posts your address from your browser straight to Buttondown; this site never receives or stores it. The address is used for this newsletter only, and every issue carries a link to unsubscribe. Sign-ups open once the newsletter's sending address on our own domain is verified; until then the form on the site is switched off.
Privacy
Pages work the same whether or not you accept analytics cookies. Analytics run only after a yes in the cookie bar. Newsletter addresses go straight from your browser to the newsletter service and are used for the newsletter only.