Trust & Transparency

Methodology

How Alto actually works, in detail: what it collects, how it ranks, where its numbers come from, and what it deliberately does not do.

Collection

Alto reads the public RSS and Atom feeds published by the outlets listed in its source directory. A background worker cycles through every enabled feed continuously, fetching each one with a hard timeout so a single slow publisher cannot stall the batch.

Items are identified by the feed's own GUID, falling back to the article URL when no GUID is supplied. Alto checks the whole batch of candidate identifiers against what it has already stored and inserts only the genuinely new ones, so a publisher re-listing an old item does not create a duplicate. For each new item Alto then fetches the article page once to extract a preview image, description, and byline.

Feeds that fail are tracked. Each consecutive failure is recorded with its reason, the poll interval is backed off so a broken feed stops consuming the cycle, and after repeated failures the feed is disabled automatically and flagged for review.

Ranking

Alto keeps one signal per story: how many times its page has been opened. That single counter drives every ranked surface on the site.

  • Breaking News is not ranked at all — it is ordered strictly by publication time, newest first.
  • Trending ranks stories published in the last 24 hours by reads.
  • Most Read ranks the trailing seven days by reads and omits stories with none.

There is no personalization. Every visitor sees the same ordering, because Alto holds no per-reader profile to personalize against. Rankings are never sold, and a commercial relationship with a publisher — or the absence of one — has no effect on placement.

Data sources for tools and hubs

Alto's free tools and data hubs read from primary official sources rather than secondary aggregators. Each page names its source and the effective date of the figures it is showing.

  • Taxes and income: IRS published brackets and standard deductions; U.S. Census Bureau income distributions.
  • Inflation and jobs: Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI and state unemployment series.
  • Energy: U.S. Energy Information Administration weekly gasoline prices and residential electricity rates.
  • Legislation and the executive branch: Congress.gov for bills and sponsors; the Federal Register for executive orders.
  • Elections: Federal Election Commission filings for campaign finance; state election authorities for voter ID rules.
  • Safety and environment: CPSC and FDA recall notices; EPA AirNow for air quality.
  • Markets, weather, and scores: licensed market data feeds, the National Weather Service, and public sports scoreboards.

Upstream responses are cached for a period appropriate to how often the source itself updates — minutes for markets and weather, hours for recalls and legislation, and longer for annual figures like tax brackets. When a source is unreachable Alto shows the last good value with its timestamp, or an explicit unavailable state. It does not interpolate, estimate, or silently fall back to stale numbers presented as current.

Tool results are calculations, not advice. Every tool carries a disclaimer naming its source and its limits, and financial, legal, medical, and tax tools direct you to a qualified professional for decisions.

What gets indexed

Alto does not ask search engines to index everything it renders. A story page is submitted for indexing only when it carries enough of its own substance — a real summary or an AI analysis — and is recent enough to still be useful. Thin or stale pages are marked noindex and are left out of the sitemap, so what Alto advertises to crawlers matches what it is willing to stand behind. Hub and list pages apply the same test against the number of stories they can actually show.

Privacy

Alto requires no account, so there is nothing to log in to and no profile to build. The read counters behind its rankings are aggregate totals per story, not per reader. See the Privacy Policy for the full account.

Corrections

Errors in Alto's own summaries, analysis, metadata, or tool data are corrected promptly. The accuracy of an aggregated article remains the responsibility of its original publisher. See Corrections to report a problem, and Editorial Standards for the policies that govern the whole site.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often does Alto check for new stories?
Alto polls every enabled publisher feed on a continuous cycle, several times an hour. Feeds that publish frequently are effectively checked as fast as they update; feeds that repeatedly fail are backed off and eventually disabled automatically.
How does Alto decide which stories are trending?
By counting story-page opens. Trending ranks the last 24 hours by that count and Most Read ranks the last seven days. There is no personalization, no editorial weighting, and no paid placement in either ranking.
Where does the data in Alto's free tools come from?
Primary official sources: the IRS and Census Bureau for tax and income, the Bureau of Labor Statistics for CPI and unemployment, the EIA for gasoline and electricity prices, Congress.gov and the Federal Register for legislation and executive orders, the FEC for campaign finance, the EPA for air quality, and the CPSC and FDA for recalls. Each tool page names its source and the date of the data it is using.
Does Alto write any of its own reporting?
No. Alto aggregates other publishers' reporting and adds context — summaries, AI analysis, and structured data from official sources. Every story credits its publisher and links to the original.