How points, rank and expiry work

Rank is total points, highest first. Ties go to whoever joined first, so an older climb is never pushed down by a newcomer who merely matched it.

• Base - 10 points, permanent. Every paid climb gets them for the $10 minimum entry. No paid climb ever drops below 10 or falls off the wall.
• Bought - $1 = 1 point, permanent. Buy at entry or any time after. A $200 entry is 10 base + 190 bought. Bought points never decay: they are a purchase, not a performance.
• Earned - they expire. +1 for each new person who reaches the wall through your share link. +5 when one of them buys a place of their own.
• Bonus - held while it is true. +30 for keeping the outclimbed badge on your own site. Not bought and not on a clock: you hold them for as long as the badge stays up. How it works.

The wall can also be read by category, or switched to Today, which ranks only what was bought and earned since midnight UTC - a different question from who is biggest overall.

A free listing goes on the wall straight away, at 0 points and with no base points. It has 90 days, and at the end of them:

• Any payment keeps it for good. Points from $10, the dofollow link or an ad slot: the moment one clears, the clock is gone and it is a permanent climb like any other.
• The badge keeps it while the badge stays. A website holding the badge bonus is not removed. Past the 90 days the badge is what keeps it there, so the day the daily check takes the bonus back (after 7 checks in a row without it), the listing is removed with it.
• With neither, it is removed. We email you 7 days before, and again when it happens.

An X profile has no page to put the badge on, so for those it is a payment or nothing. Each site or handle can be listed free once: a removed free listing can come back as a paid one, not as another free one. List one free.

There is no fading in between. A visitor point is worth a full point on day 29 and nothing on day 30, and each point runs on its own clock from the moment it was earned - so points fall off one at a time, not all at once.

Your profile shows what each climb has and what drops off within the next 7 days, and the wall marks any climb about to lose points with a flame and, for the last 7 days, a strip underneath saying how many points are going and what it will cost to pass it once they have gone.

Put the outclimbed badge on your own site and your climb holds +30 bonus points for as long as it stays there. The snippet is on your profile: copy it, paste it on the page you listed and press Verify. If you would rather put it on another page, give us its path - it has to be on the same domain.

• The badge has to be in the page's HTML, the image inside the link around it, and visible: a badge hidden with display:none, a hiding class, zero size or pushed off screen does not count. Whether the link is followed or not makes no difference.
• We check that one page once a day. If the badge is missing we email you straight away, and once more the day before the bonus goes; after 7 checks in a row without it the bonus is removed, and we email you again.
• A check that cannot reach your site - a timeout, a server error, a bot wall - is not a miss. But a page we cannot read at all for 30 days in a row can no longer be vouched for: we email you after 14, and at 30 the bonus is removed. One check that gets through starts the count again.
• Removed bonus points come back the moment the badge does: put it back and verify again.

Bonus points are not bought points. What you pay for is never taken back; a bonus is held for as long as the thing it rewards stays true, and the rules say so up front.

The badge can also show your site's Domain Rating, 0 to 100: Domain Rating by Ahrefs, refreshed weekly. It is Ahrefs' number, not ours, and it has no effect on your rank here. Check any site's DR with our free Domain Rating checker.

One point per person, once. Not per visit, not per day. If someone opens your share link a hundred times, or comes back every morning for a month, that is still the single point they were worth the first time.

Opening your own link earns nothing, traffic that looks automated is filtered out, and a visitor only counts once they have actually landed on the wall and stayed a moment - a link that is fetched but never looked at is not a visitor.

The +5 does not require anyone to buy on the spot. When someone follows your share link we remember where they came from for 30 days. If they buy a place at any point in that window - the same hour, or sixteen days later - the +5 is yours, and it then holds its full value for 6 months.

That is why sharing somewhere people come back to is worth more than a single burst of traffic: the visit pays once, but the window keeps paying.

Note the asymmetry. A visitor who pays to join is worth 5 times a passive click and lasts 6 times longer. Promote to an audience that might actually enter, not to raw traffic.

• One visitor point per person per climb, for as long as that climb exists.
• At most 10 referred-signup bonuses per climb in 24 hours. Ten real signups in a day is far beyond anything the wall has seen; ten fake ones is an afternoon's work, so the ceiling is on the cheat, not on you.
• No referring yourself. A signup that shares your email or comes from the machine you signed up on earns no bonus.
• Outbound clicks count once per person per day, so a number on the wall is people, not page reloads.
• Refunds undo what they bought. A refunded top-up removes those points; a refunded entry removes the climb and the bonus anyone earned for referring it.

The strip above the wall is separate from rank, and it is bought rather than earned. It holds 10 ads, newest first: paying puts you at the front, everyone else moves down one, and once it is full the ad at the back drops out.

While a slot is free it costs $150. Once all 10 are taken you are paying to push somebody out, and the price steps up by $100. There is no cap on where that goes - the more the strip is contested, the more a place in it costs. Position inside the strip is not for sale; every ad on screen is shown for the same length of time.

• Chat or invite links (Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Signal, Messenger).
• Adult sites.
• Bot traffic to your share link. It is deduplicated, filtered, and not counted.
• Anything illegal, deceptive, or that we simply do not want on the wall. We can hide a climb at our discretion.

The full version, including payment terms, is in the Terms.

Sign in at /login with the email you paid with. No password: we mail you a link, and opening it shows a confirmation page before anything happens, so nothing in your inbox can sign you in on its own. Everything bought under that address is in one place - each climb with its own referral link, points, clicks, and the controls to edit it, buy more points, or take it down.

Removing a climb is not reversible: the points go, including the ones you paid for, and there is no refund. The URL becomes available again, so anyone - including you - can list it afresh starting at 10 points. Payments are handled by Dodo Payments as merchant of record.

• How much does it cost to list a product on outclimbed?
• Do points expire?
• Can I lose a rank I paid for?
• How do I move up without paying more?
• What are bonus points and how do I get them?
• Are outclimbed links dofollow or nofollow?
• Can I get a refund?
• What happens if I remove my listing?

All questions and answers