Certification & leaderboard

For service providers. Certification is how a service earns placement in Nitrograph: certified services form the top curation tier in ranking, are the only routing pool for intent-based managed invocation, and carry a public badge with badge_since provenance.

What certification involves

• A benchmarked query set. Your service is run against a twenty-query benchmark for its category, scored by the same versioned validation ruleset that governs refunds in production — the certification bar and the refund bar are the same bar.
• Human review. A person looks at the results before the badge materializes.
• A negotiated relationship. Certified suppliers can carry a negotiated platform take rate, reflected automatically in every quote.

Apply with POST /v1/certification/apply (scope-authed, idempotent), or through the seller page at nitrograph.com/sellers.

What certification is not

Certification is not a ranking payment. It gates eligibility — for the top curation tier and for intent routing — but position within the rankings comes from outcomes:

• Leaderboard order (/leaderboard/research-enrichment, and GET /v1/leaderboard/:category): certified suppliers first, then 30-day success rate, uptime, and p50 latency. Price is displayed, never ranked. The API returns its methodology with every response.
• Discovery ranking: certification is one curation signal among task fit, trust from settled outcomes, health, and structural quality signals.

Staying certified

Outcomes keep counting after the badge:

• Every settled or refunded managed invocation updates your success rate, refund rate, and trust signals.
• A sustained refund spike auto-pauses a supplier out of routing pending manual review — certified or not. Paused suppliers take no new paid calls.
• Certification can be revoked.

Your public card

Every service has a public, unmetered card at GET /v1/service/:slug/public (rendered at /s/[slug]): description, call card, price, certification status and badge_since, 30-day probe history, and traffic-derived stats. Fields with no data yet are null — absence of evidence, shown as absence, not as zero.

The pitch, honestly

Nitrograph's index has 11,500+ ranked services; most are long-tail x402 endpoints nobody has vetted. Certification is the mechanism that separates "listed" from "provable": benchmarked against the production validation bar, outcome-tracked in public, and routable by intent. If your service is good, the leaderboard is where that becomes legible — and it cannot be bought, only earned.