Ranking transparency — TicketWave

When you search or browse TicketWave's public marketplace, events are ordered by a combination of organic signals and a small, clearly-labelled paid placement lane. This page describes both.

Organic ranking signals

We rank events using these factors, in roughly descending order of importance. Weights are tuned periodically based on measured outcomes, not negotiated with organisers.

Relevance. Lexical match between your query and the event title, organiser name, venue name, and description (in that priority order).
Sell-through. What fraction of capacity has sold. Events selling well rank higher.
Click-through rate. How often visitors who see the event card click into it. A 30-day rolling signal.
Geographic proximity.When you have shared your location (or it's inferred from your IP), nearer events rank higher.
Recency. Soonest events first as a tie-break; year-out events naturally rank lower than this-week events.
Organiser trust score.Derived from the organiser's history on TicketWave: events run, refund rate, dispute rate. Lower-trust organisers are deboosted but still listed.
Quality signals. Listings missing core fields (cover image, description) are deboosted.

Paid placement

Two categories of paid placement exist:

Featured listings. A flat-fee weekly slot at the top of a city or category page. Capped at 3 featured slots per page. Organisers buy these directly; the price is published at /trust/featured-pricing.
Promoted events.A pay-per-click placement above organic search results, clearly labelled “Promoted”. Our quality score for the event must meet a minimum threshold before promotion is permitted — organisers cannot buy their way past a poor refund rate.

Both paid lanes carry a visible Featured or Promoted chip in the UI. We do not blend paid placement with organic results without a label.

Bounded tier lift

Paid placement is a thumb on the scale, not a kill switch. A featured listing receives at most a small fixed score lift on top of its organic ranking — capped well below the value of strong organic signals. In practice: a high-quality basic listing with strong sell-through, recency, and relevance will outrank a low-quality featured listing on the same page. We publish this as a structural fairness rule because it is how organic-search trust survives a paid placement programme. The cap and weights are versioned in our public source repository (lib/marketplace-ranker.ts); changes ship with a version bump on this page.

Fairness rules

Two structural protections beyond the bounded tier lift apply to every page rendered by the ranker.

No single organiser may occupy more than 30% of a page's first‑page slots.When an organiser's events would, on signals alone, fill more than that share, the excess slots are swapped for the next non‑same‑organiser results. This stops one prolific organiser from monopolising a city, category, or city × category page even when their inventory is genuinely strong.
Cold‑start protection for new events. An event listed for fewer than 7 days, with no impressions yet, gets a guaranteed first‑page slot on its city × category page during its first week. After 7 days it ranks on measured signals alone. New events do not need to pay for visibility just to start gathering data.

A daily fairness audit emits a report flagging any page that violates either rule. Persistent violations are escalated to the trust & safety team. The audit machinery is in our public source repository (search for marketplace-fairness-audit).

Editorial overrides

A small number of city or category pages carry editorial highlights — events our content team selected for prominence. Editorial picks are labelled in the UI. They are not paid for.

What we do not rank on

Organiser subscription tier (Starter, Growth, Scale, Enterprise).
Whether the organiser has a custom domain or not.
Whether the organiser has paid for a premium subscription.
Personal data the buyer has not actively shared.
Sensitive characteristics inferred from browsing history (religion, politics, health, sexuality).

Updates

We update this page when ranking weights change materially. Smaller tuning is not separately announced. The full history is available in our public source repository (search git history under docs/strategy/marketplace-architecture.md).

Version history

v2.0 — April 2026.Replaced featured‑first sort with a single composite score plus bounded tier lift. Published the fairness rules (no organiser > 30% of any page; cold‑start protection for new events). Added the paid‑placement chip requirement.
v1.0 — Phase 1 launch. Initial public ranking spec. Featured‑first sort, organic signals listed without explicit weights.

Reporting a ranking concern

If you believe a listing has been ranked unfairly, or if you see paid placement that lacks a visible chip, contact us at trust@ticketwavehq.com. Reports are reviewed within five business days and feed directly into the next ranker tuning cycle.