Methodology ยท v1.0
How this site knows what it knows
Rugby Atlas is a database with pages, not a blog. That's a real difference, and it's checkable: every fact on this site carries a source and a verification date.
The rules
1. Facts come from the source. Specs come from the manufacturer's own product page, or, where the maker publishes no specs (which is common), a major UK stockist's product page. Never from other reviews, never from memory, never from a language model's guess. Each fact stores the URL it came from and when it was read.
2. A human verifies before anything publishes. Collected facts land in a staging queue. Nothing appears on the site until a person has reviewed and approved it. If the source doesn't state something, whether a weight or a width fitting, the page leaves it blank rather than guessing.
3. Pages are rendered from data, never written by AI.Every page on this site is a template filled from the verified database. No article-shaped content is generated by a machine and published. The AI-written buying guides clogging rugby search results are the reason this site exists.
4. Everything gets re-checked. Verified facts have a re-check schedule. When reality moves (a model is discontinued, a spec changes, a price drops), the database updates and every page that renders from it updates with it. The "verified" stamps on each page are real dates from that process.
5. Money never touches rankings. We earn affiliate commission when you buy through links on this site. Commission rates have no input into what we list, how we order tables, or what we say suits whom. More in how we make money.
How we rank
Every table is ranked on a stated criterion, and the criterion is always visible. "Ranked by weight, lightest first" means exactly that: the order is computed from verified figures, not from an opinion.
You can click any column heading to re-rank the table yourself. Boots with no figure for the ranking criterion sort last rather than being quietly dropped.
Where we name a pick, we publish the rule that chose it."The cheapest boot in this table by RRP" is a rule you can check against the table in front of you. If you disagree with the rule, you can see it and ignore the pick.
Third-party ratings are cited, never copied, and never trusted blindly. Where a retailer publishes an aggregate rating for a boot, we record the figure, the number of people behind it, the source and the date we read it, and we link out. We do not reproduce anyone's review text.
The count is always printed next to the score, and a rating from fewer than 10 people is shown but never ranked on, so a 5.0 from five people cannot outrank a 4.6 from fifty-two.
Coverage is thin and uneven by nature: most rugby boots have no published ratings anywhere, so most of ours show nothing here rather than a number we invented to fill the gap.
We do not publish invented scores. Nobody at Rugby Atlas has worn and tested all of these boots, so a score out of 100 would be fiction dressed as data, and made-up authority is the exact thing this site was built against.
If a genuine score ever appears here, it will come from either real testing or a published aggregation of other people's reviews, and the methodology version will say which.
Clubs: sourced differently, licensed openly
The clubs directory uses open data instead of manufacturer/retailer pages, because no equivalent exists for rugby clubs. We deliberately do not use the RFU's own club-finder tool: its data API is disallowed by its ownrobots.txt, and this site respects robots.txt everywhere, on every source, without exception. That means the clubs directory is smaller than the RFU's own count, and fields only the RFU publishes (contact details, team-by-age-group breakdowns) are genuinely absent rather than a gap we intend to fill by scraping around the rule.
Three fully open sources instead: OpenStreetMap (location, contact details where a club has added them, licensed under the Open Database Licence (ODbL), which requires attribution and that any derived database we redistribute stays open under compatible terms), Wikidata (founding year, league, CC0, no attribution legally required though we credit it anyway), and Companies House (registration number, incorporation date, registered postcode, for clubs run as limited companies, Crown copyright data under the Open Government Licence). Every club page states which source(s) it came from. Where a Companies-House-only club shows coordinates, they come from the registered-office postcode, geocoded, that can be an accountant's or solicitor's office rather than the actual clubhouse, and the page says so.
Photographs
We do not copy product photographs onto our servers. Where you see a product image, it is served directly from the maker's or the seller's own page and credited to them, so it stays under their control: if they change or remove it, it changes or disappears here too.
We never scrape and re-host imagery, and we never generate a product photo. As brands grant us permission and our retailer feeds connect, those licensed images replace the embedded ones.
If you are a brand or retailer and would rather we did not show your image this way, tell us and it comes down the same day.
What v1.0 doesn't do yet
Live retailer prices and stock are connecting now, and licensed product photographs arrive with them. Both will land under a versioned methodology, so you can see what changed and when.