Reach is 22% of the score. Most of us still sort boards by traffic.

I keep seeing the same launch thread. Someone asks where to ship, three people name the loudest rooms, and nobody mentions what the visitor is supposed to do after they arrive. That is the reach habit. We treat audience size like it is the whole decision.

I wrote the weights down on Best Launch Platforms so I would stop doing that from memory. The BLP Index is a 0 to 100 score: reach 22%, intent 20%, evergreen 18%, AI visibility 15%, fairness 13%, ease 12%. No paid rows. Traffic figures are planning ranges, not a platform's private analytics. Those six numbers are on the methodology page if you want the exact wording rather than my recap.

Reach is the ceiling. How big can launch day get, in a realistic case, not the screenshot from the one founder who already had an audience. It matters. It is also the smallest reason to ignore the other five, and somehow it is the only column people paste into Slack.

Intent is the one that changed my own calendar. A big room can be full of people who will never try the product. If the visit does not turn into a signup, a bug report, or even a confused question, I paid a day for a graph. I would rather have fewer people who click into the product and say one specific thing.

Evergreen is why a listing that dies at midnight is a different tool from a page that is still indexed next quarter. If you need a backlink and a URL you can send in six weeks, you are shopping the 18% weight, not the traffic ceiling. Sorting those two jobs into one "launch day" is how weeks get wasted.

AI visibility is 15%, which is enough to break a tie and not enough to be a strategy. Two boards can look similar on traffic and only one of them gets cited by answer engines. That is a real reason to prefer the cited one when you are already listing the product in comparison pages. It is not a reason to skip a room where a human will actually try the thing.

Fairness is the column I wish I had stared at earlier. A high score on a blunt community does not help if you have no network and the front page is a pile-on. A calmer board where a no-name maker can still be seen is sometimes the better week, even when the reach number looks smaller. Ease is the quiet killer. A board you cannot finish without a badge, a rewrite, and a third form will eat the morning you needed for support. Higher ease just means you still have a Tuesday.

I run Aura++ as the daily example of this split, not as a promise about traffic. Products go live at 8:00 AM UTC, the page stays, and the job is a founder crowd that can try the product, not a stadium. Reach is not why I would book it. If you are picking boards only by who has the most visitors, you are optimizing 22% of the score and hoping the other 78% sorts itself out. Write down which weight you actually need this month. The shortlist gets shorter the same afternoon.