CardMasters

I started CardMasters because the headline reward rate was rarely the number that decided whether a card was good.

After checking all 73 active cards in the catalogue against issuer pages and terms, four patterns kept repeating:

• A monthly cap often matters more than the advertised percentage.

• Merchant-routed rewards should not be stretched across generic online spending.

• Fees, redemption costs and exclusions can erase a high earn rate.

• Affiliate commission has to stay outside the ranking model.

The product now runs every public ranking and the logged-in wallet recommendation through the same deterministic scoring engine. Each computed card needs a dated issuer-source check; approval remains an estimate, never a bank decision.

I also published the evidence surface so the assumptions can be challenged:

https://www.cardmasters.in/credit-card-changes?utm_source=indiehackers&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=issuer_terms_lessons_202608&utm_content=founder_post

For founders building trust-sensitive products: what would make you trust a recommendation more—the exact calculation, the original source, or visible outcome feedback from other users? I would value blunt feedback on what is still missing.

Five weeks in, CardMasters went from 20 indexed pages to 210, and from zero to 2,690 Search Console impressions in the last 28 days. 10 clicks. Average position 57. Posting the numbers because most "SEO is working" posts skip the part where you are still on page six.

What moved it: 426 pages generated from one 79-card catalogue, each answering a single query shape — category shortlists, issuer hubs, bank x spending-category rankings, merchant pages, salary bands, head-to-head comparisons. Every figure is computed, not copied: each card's earn rate runs through its own monthly cap, exclusions and surcharges before it is published, so "best card for groceries" is a rupee number per Rs 10,000 spent. And a hard rule that a page with fewer than three qualifying cards does not get published at all — fuel has one paying card, so there is no fuel page.

What is not working: position 57 means almost nobody sees any of it, and 231 pages sit in Discovered or Crawled - currently not indexed. Coverage is not authority. On a five-week-old domain that is Google saying "I see them, I am not convinced."

Next: per-family sitemaps so Search Console shows which page family is being refused, then citations instead of more pages. Numbers and schema setup happy to share: https://www.cardmasters.in