Ranked by how it actually feels.

Rum Runner's index is small on purpose, and the gate is experience quality — how a page treats the people who visit it. We borrow Google's own yardstick to set it: a site earns a place only if it carries Chrome UX Report field data — real-user experience Google has actually measured and published. No field data, no entry. That is the floor, by construction: every result you see has a real audience and a real, measured experience behind it. From there, we curate.

So when a search comes up empty and you know a site that belongs — one real people actually use — add it. It meets the same quality floor as everything else in the index, and your contribution improves the next search for everyone who looks for it.

Two things happen the moment you do. It's yours right away — Rum Runner initializes the site and you can work with it immediately, no waiting on anyone. And it enters moderation for the shared index — the results the rest of us see. That review is deliberate: this is a curated engine, not an open crawl, so a domain joins the commons only after it clears the bar we hold the whole index to.

What that bar is, beyond the field-data floor, we keep to ourselves for now — the same way we keep our ranking weights. The emphasis is easy to state even when the rules aren't published: experience quality first, real audiences first, and a curator's judgment about what makes this index worth trusting. If something you add doesn't make the shared index, you'll still have it for your own work — and you're welcome to ask. This is a curated experience-quality search engine. The curation is the point.

Rum Runner ranks by what's genuinely good for the people already on your page. That's a deliberate choice with a quiet dividend: the work that raises you in our results is, more often than not, the same work the rest of the web has been moving to reward. We won't oversell it — most of it is likely to help, not promised. In one place, though, we don't have to hedge at all.

Core Web Vitals. Google has said it plainly, in its own Search documentation: page experience — Core Web Vitals among it — is something its ranking systems look to reward. So when a page earns a lift here for the experience it actually delivered, it's rewarded on the exact terms Google has published. Steadying a layout shift for your visitors isn't a trade against ranking; it's the same move, counted twice. That's the spirit of the whole engine — we didn't invent this signal; Google measures it and generously publishes it, and we simply chose to let it count.

A smaller one doubles as an old SEO instinct made measurable. When you visit a page with the Rum Runner extension, it sees what a real browser renders — including where the fold falls. The words above the fold, the ones a visitor actually reads on arrival, earn a modest boost in our ranking. The idea behind it is information scent: a page that puts its subject where people land is likelier to deliver on the promise that brought them. No one can hand you a rule that Google does precisely this — but rewarding pages that are visibly, immediately about what they claim is an instinct that has aged well for twenty-five years, and tends to keep paying off wherever a reader — or a ranker — decides whether a page is the real thing.

We read your internal links much the same way, through an old idea from the early science of the web — bow-tie theory, the map of how a site's pages gather into a well-connected core and reach out to its edges. The lesson is as plain as it is durable: weave your quiet pages into the ones already working, and lend them that standing. Google has moved on from PageRank as such, so we're honest that this shapes how you fare in Rum Runner's search first and foremost — but sound internal linking is the kind of habit that has never stopped mattering to Google and Bing alike.

None of this asks you to choose between your users and your rankings. Steady the layout, lead with your subject, connect your best pages to your neglected ones — and you've made the page better for the people already there while raising where it stands in Rum Runner search. In the one place we can point to a published rule instead of a seasoned instinct — Core Web Vitals — you've raised where it stands in Google, too. Help your visitors; your prospects follow.

Rum Runner indexes pages that are already published and publicly reachable, and only those carrying real CrUX field data. We fetch politely and identify ourselves honestly. We honour robots.txt and noindex — and we honour them livingly: every scan re-evaluates, so a directive you add today takes effect on our next look, and one you remove restores the page just as automatically. You never have to ask us to notice.

The fastest removal is the one you control. A noindex directive or a robots.txt disallow needs no request, no account, and no reply from us. It works on every search engine at once, including this one.

To address Rum Runner specifically, our product token is RumRunner — the same name we send in our user-agent, so what you write is what we read:

User-agent: RumRunner
Disallow: /

We honour that, and we will tell you exactly what it does rather than let you find out. Our scanner stops fetching you, and your pages stop appearing in AlphaSearch results for the public. What it does not do is reach into what a person already saw in their own browser. If someone visits your site with our extension installed, their own view of those pages stays available to them and to nobody else — no public listing, no other account, no ranking.

That line is deliberate, and here is the reasoning, because you are entitled to judge it. robots.txt is an instruction to automated retrieval. It has never governed what a person sees when they visit a page themselves, and we are not going to be the first to claim otherwise — not least because the Core Web Vitals data underneath this whole product comes from Google's public CrUX dataset, collected from real Chrome users on pages including ones that disallow crawlers. We could not suppress that if we wanted to, and neither can Google. Taking a person's own record of their own browsing away from them would be a stricter rule than the dataset we are built on, applied to the one party who did nothing automated at all.

So the practical shape is this: excluding us costs you the public listing and the traffic that comes with it, and it costs a visiting practitioner nothing. We think that is more generous than the alternative on offer elsewhere — exclude Googlebot and you are gone entirely, including from things people did by hand — and we would rather say so plainly than have you discover the difference.

If you would rather ask us directly, we will act on a request from a verified owner. Verification matters: without it, anyone could delist a site they have nothing to do with. There are two routes, and neither of them requires you to buy anything.

• Self-serve. If you already work with Rum Runner and have connected Google Search Console for the domain, you can remove or restore its listing yourself. Google performs the ownership verification; we simply read that the connection exists.
• Ask a human. Email hello@rum.tools from an address at the domain, or point us at any control you hold over it. We will verify ownership and act. No account, no subscription.

Removing a listing removes it from search results here. It does not change what Google measures, and it does not affect an RR user's own analysis of their site — the listing and the measurement are separate things.

One thing we will state plainly rather than leave you to infer: we apply this the same way to everyone. Our judgment lives in what we choose to include — this is a small, curated index and we are selective about experience quality. It does not live in who we are willing to remove. A verified owner who asks is a verified owner who asks, whoever they are and whatever we happen to think of them.

Are you an individual rather than a site owner, asking about a page that concerns you personally? That is a different and narrower question than the one above, and we will engage with it on its own terms — write to us at the same address.