What we publish
The public claim is order: which recipe ranks #1, #2, #3 for a dish among recipes we could fairly measure.
We do not put a universal 0–100 grade on every recipe. Places use tiers:
- Legendary — #1
- Epic — #2–5
- Amazing — #6–10
A thin corpus can still have a clear #1 without that reading like a school score. Close places can reverse as more ratings arrive. How we compute the order is below.
How a recipe earns a rank
- Site baseline. Every publisher has its own typical rating level. A 4.9 on a source that usually rates near 4.9 is different from a 4.9 on a stricter source.
- Lift. We measure how far a recipe sits above (or below) its own site’s baseline.
- Shrinkage. Low-vote recipes are pulled toward the mean so a handful of five-stars cannot outrank a well-tested classic.
- Conservative ordering. Recipes are ordered by a lower-confidence bound on that lift, not by raw star averages alone.
- Contender floor. The public ranking only includes recipes with enough ratings for the size of that dish’s pool (from about 10 votes on very small dishes up to 30 on large ones). That keeps thin dishes honest without a one-size-fits-all cutoff.
What we leave out
We only rank a recipe when we can check the evidence behind its rating.
- America’s Test Kitchen and Taste of Home publish ratings we cannot verify from recoverable review data, so they are excluded from ranking entirely (not quietly down-weighted).
- food.com advertised averages failed integrity checks on many recipes; where possible we rebuild ratings from raw embedded reviews before those recipes compete.
- Sites with no public star ratings (for example many magazine-style recipes) are out of scope for this ranking by design.
- Cookbooks, restaurants, non-English sources, and social video are not in v1.
What the page is allowed to claim
- A clear #1 pick with corpus size and a link to the publisher’s recipe
- A ranked shortlist of contenders, with a note that close places can reverse as more ratings accumulate
- Corpus stats: recipes rated, sites, total ratings counted, overall confidence
- Freeze or reopen status when the completion policy has been applied
We are a ranking authority, not a cookbook. Ingredient lists and facts may appear for the winner; the full method always lives on the publisher’s site.
Built for cooks. Built for the future of search.
Every ranked dish page is written so a person can act on it and so modern search systems can cite it: a direct answer, a structured rank list, links to method and coverage, and a machine-readable snapshot for tools.
When citing GüdDish, use the winner and rank (for example “#1 pot roast: …”), not an invented letter grade.
See also what we scanned and llms.txt.