Each time the dashboard is refreshed, a script reads two GetYourGuide lists for every city where Big Bus operates: the search results for "Hop-on/hop-off tours", and the city's "Bus & minivan tours" category page. It reads them the same way a visitor would. It reads the first page of results (about 24 listings) and notes where each Big Bus product appears. It then checks who sells each listing, so Big Bus can be told apart from competitors such as Tootbus, City Sightseeing and TopView. Every run is saved, which is how the dashboard shows changes over time.
Hop-on/hop-off search loads getyourguide.com/en-gb/s/?q=Hop-on/hop-off tours, {city}. Bus & minivan tours loads the city's category page, e.g. getyourguide.com/en-gb/paris-l16/bus-minivan-tours-tc4/, ordered by GetYourGuide's default "Recommended" sort. Use the switcher at the top of the page to move between them. Both use the UK English site with prices in pounds and a fresh session with no cookies or login, so results aren't shaped by anyone's browsing history. Requests are spaced about a second apart, and a page that fails to load is retried twice.
For every listing on the first results page: its position, title, link, location label, star rating and number of reviews, the "from" price (and the original price when discounted), and any badge such as "Top pick" or "Certified by GetYourGuide".
GetYourGuide's search sometimes resolves a city name to a different place. For example, "Washington DC" returns results for Seattle in Washington State, so that city is searched as "District of Columbia" instead. If fewer than half the listings are labelled with the expected city, the city is marked Wrong city and left out of the rankings.
Listing titles often don't name the company. New York's top hop-on hop-off listing, for instance, is sold by TopView without saying so. So the script opens each product's page and reads its "Activity provider", then matches that name to known operators. "Big Bus Tours/LES CARS ROUGES" counts as Big Bus, for example. If a product page shows no provider, the title is used instead, and anything that matches no known operator is grouped as Other. Providers are remembered, so later runs only look up products they haven't seen before.
Best rank is the highest position held by any Big Bus listing in that city. Change compares it with the last run in which the city was checked successfully (▲ means Big Bus moved up). Not on page 1 means no Big Bus listing appeared among the first results. On the Competitors tab, each operator's cell shows its best position and how many of the top 10 places it holds.
Fetch failed means the page wouldn't load after retries. Page layout changed means it loaded but no listings could be read, which usually means GetYourGuide has redesigned the page. These cities are left out of the totals and never counted as Big Bus missing from the results. If more than half the cities fail, the run is kept for the record but this page is not updated.
GetYourGuide ranks activities by popularity, ratings, availability and commission, and its algorithm changes often. Two searches a few minutes apart can differ by one to three places, so small moves aren't necessarily meaningful. Each run is a single snapshot from the point of view of a visitor in the UK, and only the first page of results is checked.