Why we built tauRank
tauRank is built by a host. We run short-term rentals in Timișoara, Romania, under the name Ospitalier, and most of our guests come from abroad: Germany, Austria, Italy, the UK. For a long time, when a month looked thin, we did what every host does: opened Airbnb, searched the city for a weekend, and scrolled until we found ourselves.
What we found was never quite what the bookings said. A listing on page one at home would have a quiet fortnight from Germany, and one buried at home would keep booking from the UK. The search we were running was the one search our guests never ran, from the one country they were not in.
The question
Where is my listing for the guests who actually book it? Put that way it is obviously the question that matters, and obviously one a host cannot answer from their own browser. Both platforms shape search by the searcher's country, and a host only has one.
We could answer it for ourselves, with a bit of code and a few connections abroad. Once it ran daily the answer was clear and uncomfortable: our position swung by dozens of places between countries, and the swings did not line up with anything we were changing. The country was a variable we had never been able to see, and it was a large one.
What we built
tauRank runs the search a guest runs, from the countries your guests come from, every day, and keeps the history. For each listing it reports position per country, the gap between countries, and your price against the listings a guest in that country is shown next to you. The methodology sets out exactly what is measured and how.
Two decisions were made early and have held. First, nothing is modelled: every number on the site was read from a search we ran, on a day we name. Second, the product stays small. It is one thing, rank by guest country, done every day, and the pricing is a few plans and a credit for a one-off check, not a suite.
The city reports
Running the same searches for many hosts in the same city gave us something we had not planned for: a daily picture of how far a whole city's search differs by country. We publish that as the city reports, as aggregates only, with no listing named. They exist because we found the figures surprising and could not find them published anywhere, and because a host deciding whether to track a city should be able to see first whether the country gap there is worth tracking.
Where this goes
Romania first, where we host and where the reports started, then the cities our own guests come from and go to. Everything new is listed in the changelog and mirrored on GitHub. If you host and have a question the data could answer, write to hello@taurank.com; the best features so far have been someone else's question.