Our Methodology

European Tech Map follows a rigorous evaluation methodology to ensure every listed company meets our quality standards for digital sovereignty, EU data residency, and service reliability.

Evaluation Criteria

• European headquarters: Company must be headquartered in Europe
• EU data protection: Must be built with GDPR in mind and demonstrate EU data protection practices
• EU data residency: Must offer data hosting within the European Union
• Active product: Must have a live, publicly available product or service
• Legitimate business: Must be an established company with verifiable information

Verification Process

Each company listing is reviewed for accuracy. Verified and featured companies undergo additional checks including website verification, data residency confirmation, and certification validation.

How listings are ranked

The default Recommended order is organic. It measures how much decision-useful information a listing publishes and how recently that information was confirmed.

• Information depth (80%): how many of 35 vendor-supplied fields the listing publishes. Only fields a vendor can supply themselves count, and every listing is measured against the same 35, whatever it pays. Six of those 35 fields can only be edited on a paid plan.
• Freshness (20%): how recently the listing data was last confirmed. This decays gradually and never drops below a floor, so an older but complete listing is not buried.

Ties are broken by the most recent confirmation date and then by a stable internal identifier, so the order is deterministic.

Payment never moves a listing up inside the organic order. There is no tier term in it. What a paid plan buys is the ability to publish more, and only information a vendor actually publishes counts. Sponsored placements are pinned to the top of the results and labelled as sponsored. Below the pin, payment has no effect on order. Where a page also carries a sponsored banner, the sponsor appears in the banner and is not repeated in the results below it.

The completeness figure shown to vendors in their dashboard is a different, plan-relative measure of the same fields, so a free listing can still reach 100% there. It is not the ranking input.

Other sort options (Most Popular, Newest, Name, Country) apply their own stated criterion and are equally blind to tier.

Editorial independence

Verification is an editorial judgement. Sponsorship does not influence whether a company qualifies for a listing or for the Verified badge, and Verified status can be revoked from a sponsored listing on the same grounds as any other.

European Tech Map does earn money from some of the links it publishes. Certain outbound links to vendor sites are affiliate or per-conversion links, which means we may be paid when a visitor signs up or buys. That commercial relationship never affects whether a company is listed, whether it is verified, or where it appears in the organic order.