Data philosophy
Built for retrieval, not for scrolling
Agent Retrieval Index treats machine readers — search engines, AI answer systems, retrieval bots, and agents — as first-class users. Humans get the same pages, and benefit from the same discipline.
The thesis
An increasing share of product research is done by software on a person's behalf: an AI assistant answering "which power station should I buy for home backup," a search engine composing an answer box, an agent filling a procurement spreadsheet. Those systems don't need persuasive prose — they need identifiable entities, normalized attributes, explicit verdicts, timestamps, and sources they can verify. That is what this index publishes.
How this differs from a review blog
| Dimension | Typical review blog | Agent Retrieval Index |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of content | An article optimized for a keyword | An entity (product, comparison, category) with a stable URL |
| Specifications | Prose mentions, inconsistent units | Normalized attribute tables, same keys and units across brands |
| Recommendations | "Top 10 best X" rankings | Explicit verdicts plus scenario → product mappings |
| Freshness | Opaque; often years stale | Visible last-updated dates on every entity and in the sitemap |
| Machine access | Incidental; sometimes bot-blocked | Deliberate: crawlable HTML, machine summary blocks, open robots.txt |
| Monetization | Affiliate links shape the content | Affiliate/merchant links are a clearly-labelled secondary layer; the facts layer is merchant-agnostic |
Commitments to machine readers
- All core content is server-rendered HTML — nothing important requires JavaScript to read.
- robots.txt allows crawling broadly by default, including AI and agent crawlers.
- URLs are stable identifiers; entities are added, not silently rewritten into different things.
- Product and comparison pages open with a visible key-value machine summary block.
- Every entity states when it was last updated and where its facts came from.
- Semantic markup throughout: real headings, real tables, real definition lists.
Product pages also carry a clearly-separated Where to buy block listing retailer offers, some of them affiliate links. That commerce layer sits on top of the facts layer and never feeds it: retailer listings are not a source for any normalized specification, and prices are hand-entered with a checked-on date and withheld once stale — see the affiliate disclosure.
The methodology page documents the collection and normalization
rules; safety and
editorial standards document the limits we hold
ourselves to; AI & research use and
llms.txt tell machine readers how to use the site.
Structured JSON exports are live for every collection:
products,
generators,
solar-kits,
categories,
comparisons,
use-cases, and
spokes — plus per-entity JSON at
{entity-url minus trailing slash}.json; every machine summary
block links to its own.
Current scope
The index covers US-market portable power across three product families, each with its own schema, source policy, and normalization rules — this index never pretends watt-hours, gallons, and panel wattage are the same property:
- Battery power stations — 34 indexed. Sealed, indoor-safe, rechargeable.
- Portable generators — 14 indexed. Fuel-burning inverter and conventional units; outdoor-only, with stricter safety-field rules (a model with ambiguous carbon-monoxide-shutdown documentation is not published at all).
- RV solar kits — 11 indexed. Panel kits that recharge a battery bank; charging systems, not standalone power sources.
Above the families sits the Portable Power hub, with 10 cross-category use-case guides that weigh the three families against each other on shared decision axes (indoor safety, fumes, noise, output, runtime model, setup) — grouped by category, never merged into one ranking. Alongside them, 7 single-category use-case pages rank power stations in depth, and 11 comparisons set same-category products against the same attribute keys.
Standalone base models only. Every core specification is normalized from official manufacturer sources with field-level provenance (raw claim text, source URL, date checked, confidence), and records that fail the publishability gate are not published — the build itself refuses them. Coverage expands family by family.