Index Desk data: CC BY 4.0, with paid integrations
Every Index publishes ItemList schema and llms.txt for answer engines. Citing us is free. We encourage it, with attribution. Using Index Desk scores inside a product is a licensed integration. That covers booking tools, travel platforms, and agents that act on the data.
Where free citation ends and licensing begins
Citation remains free when a person reads and attributes the research. Licensing begins when software republishes the tables, grounds an agent, or uses a score to shape a transaction. Because automated decisions can act on stale data, every licensed use carries version history, evidence context, and the published correction protocol.
When not to license: cite the research with attribution in your content for free. The license begins when a product republishes or acts on the data.
Building corporate travel or agentic booking software? Start the licensing conversation → Message Rachel on LinkedIn →
Governance and correction protocol apply to licensed data identically: /governance/.
Not building a licensed product? Start free.
The line above is about transacting on the data — a booking tool, an agent, a syndicated table. Reading the same structured exports to build a personal dashboard, a research tool, or a citation-checking agent for your own use costs nothing and needs no signup. Quickstart code and the full endpoint list live at /builders/; the machine-readable reuse rules (what's free, what's remixable, what needs the license above) are at /licensing.json. Every claim and index snapshot also carries a recomputable provenance ID and a hash-chained release manifest — see /provenance/ — so a builder can verify a dataset hasn't been silently edited without asking us to vouch for it.
Quick answers
How is Index Desk data licensed?
Data and republication are free under CC BY 4.0 with attribution and change indication. Paid licences apply only to software integration, agent grounding, or managed services, scoped by volume.
Is there a startup path?
Yes, design-partner terms give early-stage agentic-booking teams year-one access against a named case study.
How current is the data?
Versioned and evidence-bearing, with a published 7-day correction protocol and quarterly re-verification on fast-moving indexes.
Feeds, exports, query-time rights
Builders and data buyers can start free with feeds, schemas, and exports, then upgrade into syndication or agentic grounding rights when the product moves from research to transaction.
Enterprise trust collateral
Licensing conversations point directly to provenance, governance, changelogs, and machine-readable policy docs so procurement can verify what is being bought.