ReaderFunded · about
ReaderFunded is a search engine over the web that its own readers pay for. A site is in the index only when real people fund it directly - a membership, a donation, a paid subscription, a sponsorship - and only when that funding is verified both ways: the site links to its funding page, and the funding page names the site back. A Patreon that mentions a site it likes is not evidence; a site pasting someone else's donation link is not evidence. Both together are. How it is measured, in a page.
The idea under test is that money given voluntarily is a costly, hard-to-fake signal of quality, and that a search engine ranking by it finds the human web - the writers, researchers, artists, cooks, historians and tinkerers whose readers keep them going - better than one ranking by links or by advertising.
From the blog: A search engine that ranks sites by whether readers pay for them.
6620885 pages indexed across 41850 funded sites, 93162 seeds, propagated scores from run monthly-2026-10-07. A funded site here is one with a published or an estimated number of paying supporters (tier A or B) and pages indexed; seeds are every site with verified reader funding, those with no supporter count included, and are what the ranking starts from. The run named is the monthly verification pass whose figures the ranking uses. The line is refreshed hourly.
Funded sites (tier A and B) by the platform their funding is verified on (a site can be on several):
| Buy Me a Coffee | 16,768 |
| Patreon | 15,658 |
| YouTube | 8,169 |
| Substack | 4,860 |
| GitHub Sponsors | 4,206 |
| Ko-fi | 1,846 |
| Open Collective | 874 |
| Tipeee | 581 |
| Steady | 411 |
| IRS 990 | 174 |
| on-chain (BTC) | 136 |
| SubscribeStar Adult | 126 |
| Liberapay | 124 |
| SubscribeStar | 60 |
By topic: general 17,228, tech 4,334, podcast 2,099, games 1,883, music 1,761, art 1,358, fiction 945, education 831, comics 674, film 668, religion 643, travel 594 and the rest on each site's page. Topics and languages are read from the text and are heuristic; "general" is where no topic clearly leads.
Nothing to submit. A site is indexed when its funding link is verified both ways: a link from the site to its Patreon, Steady, Tipeee, Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee, Substack, Liberapay, GitHub Sponsors, SubscribeStar or OpenCollective page, and that page naming the site - by its address, or by its name when the page is named after the site or says the name in words (see how). The next crawl and verification pass pick it up. The site page shows what the index knows about any domain; to contest a figure, name it.
Nothing about you. No cookies, no accounts, no address or browser recorded. What is counted is what was asked - the query, the category, the result count - so the index can learn what it lacks, and the name of the site a visit came from when the browser gives it (google.com, news.ycombinator.com), so we know who sends readers here. The site is served through Cloudflare, which sees the connection the way any content network does. Safe search and language settings travel in the address, not in a cookie.
A free JSON API answers the same ranking as this page (/api/search?q=) and what the site page knows (/api/site/<domain>), and an MCP server at /mcp gives an assistant the same two things as tools. Send a User-Agent and link back; the search needs no key, the site lookup does.
contact@readerfunded.com. Corrections, a site that should or should not be here, a question about a number: mail is read, not automated. For a specific site, name the figure on its site page. On the Fediverse: @[email protected] (the rel=me is what lets that server verify this page as mine).
© 2026 Georgi R Georgiev. An independent research project, not affiliated with any funding platform. How it is measured · Search tips · the top 10,000 · new this week · explore · contact@readerfunded.com