The Techmeme leaderboard explained for SEO and PR people
General lists are free, topic lists cost $100 each, and a satirical paper keeps its own joke scoreboard.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom, Editorial team··3 min read
The Techmeme leaderboard is a set of lists that rank the most influential and prolific technology writers, based on which stories Techmeme features and on a crawl of news coverage by topic. If you work in SEO or PR and also want a lighter look at who is "winning" tech this week, TechTwitter IO runs a satirical page called The Leaderboards that scores the week's stories as jokes.
The real lists are the useful part, so start there.
What the leaderboards measure
Techmeme's leaderboards page describes two kinds of list.
General Leaderboards are the classic ones. They come from the stories featured on Techmeme's home page over the past 180 days, and there are two: Techmeme Leadership and Techmeme Presence. They are free to view.
Topic Leaderboards are built differently. Techmeme's crawler goes through thousands of news publications to find the authors and publications that are most influential and prolific on a given topic over the past 120 days. The page says these are meant for communications professionals and publishers. Topics range from single companies such as Apple, Nvidia and Anthropic to themes such as AI chips, privacy, payments and VC deals.
| List | Based on | Window | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| General Leaderboards | Stories featured on Techmeme | 180 days | Free |
| Sample Topic Leaderboards | Crawl of news publications | 120 days | Free |
| Other Topic Leaderboards | Crawl of news publications | 120 days | $100 each, one-time |
The two free samples are OpenAI and TikTok. Paid topic lists come as HTML or PDF, and the page states that it is a one-time purchase, not a subscription.
Why SEO and PR people care
A topic list is a ready-made answer to "who covers this beat most". For digital PR, that is a short list of writers to read before you pitch, so the pitch fits what they already cover. For link building, it points to the publications Techmeme's crawl ranks highest on your topic.
There is an answer-engine angle too. When you check which articles AI search tools cite for a topic, compare them with the topic list. If the same names keep showing up, those are the writers worth knowing.
How a story reaches Techmeme
You do not buy your way onto Techmeme headlines. The site has a tip form where you submit a story you think it is likely to feature, and the form says tipping your own company's story is fine if there is a good chance Techmeme will post it. Human editors vet every tip. On the desktop home page you can also tip secondary links under a headline, and the form says the bar for those is lower.
Techmeme does sell sponsor posts and event listings, but its about page treats those as advertising, separate from editorial headlines.
The satirical leaderboard
TechTwitter IO is a free satirical newspaper of tech Twitter, and its D1 page, The Leaderboards, turns the week into fake scoreboards: one edition charted an IPO filing's risk-factor pages against everything else in the document. It sits beside sections such as Markets, Launches and Incident Report, plus daily puzzles.
It is satire, and its footer says so: unless a post links to its source, the people and quotes are parody or invented. Do not put a TechTwitter IO score in a client report. Read it for the jokes, and use Techmeme's own lists for the data.
Which to use
For pitch lists and authority research, Techmeme's leaderboards are the right tool, and the free general lists are a good place to start. For a break after a long audit, open the satirical daily paper and scroll back through old editions.