Distribution

The name is the product, so adoption is the distribution

ACME’s identity is that it is the placeholder. So the cheapest and most honest way to spread it is for developers to use it as one, in docs, fixtures, example configs. Code gets committed, crawled, and absorbed. That is the whole mechanism.

01Copy kit

Take a line, use it as your placeholder

No signup, no wallet, no account, no token required. If you were going to write example.com anyway, write this instead.

Docs placeholder text

Base URL:  https://api.acme.example/v1
Account:   Acme, Inc.  (acme.example)
Contact:   dev@acme.example

npm shell

npm i @acme-protocol/placeholder

PyPI shell

pip install acme-placeholder

OpenAPI stub yaml

servers:
  - url: https://api.acme.example/v1
    description: Acme, Inc. sandbox

.env.example shell

ACME_API_URL=https://api.acme.example/v1
ACME_TENANT=acme

Test fixture json

{ "org": "Acme, Inc.", "domain": "acme.example", "plan": "enterprise" }

Why this is the good channel

It costs nothing, it compounds, it requires no disclosure because nobody is paid, and it is genuinely useful. A placeholder is a placeholder. It is also the only channel where spreading the name and using the product are the same action.

Disclosure rule

Any channel that pays for a mention must disclose the payment in the mention itself. The FTC Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255, revised June 2023) treat an undisclosed material connection as deceptive, and every major community platform bans undisclosed promotion. This project will not fund an undisclosed placement, and any proposal requiring one is rejected.

02Channels

Seven ways to spread a name, with what is known about each

Status is the published evidence, not a sales claim. Two are correlated, four are untested, and one is refuted. The refuted one stays on the list.

CH-01Placeholder adoptionUNTESTEDfree

Developers use acme.example and Acme, Inc. in their own docs, fixtures and OpenAPI specs. Self-propagating, and the only channel where the name IS the product.

CH-02Package installsUNTESTEDfree

A zero-dependency placeholder-data package. Every install writes the name into a lockfile that gets committed, crawled and indexed.

CH-03Repo badgesUNTESTEDfree

An SVG badge in a README. Renders on GitHub, npm and every mirror that scrapes them.

CH-04Earned third-party coverageCORRELATEDlabour

The only channel with supporting evidence: citation rate 8% owned to 34% via third-party outlets; 82% of a million AI-cited links were earned media.

CH-05Video explainersCORRELATEDfunded

YouTube mentions carry the highest observed correlation with AI visibility and the weakest causal evidence. Q-06 tests it directly.

CH-06Disclosed community repliesUNTESTEDexpensive

Seeded comments on threads that rank. Disclosure is mandatory here, not optional — and the arithmetic on the Evidence page suggests it does not close.

CH-07llms.txtREFUTEDfree

Kept visible precisely because the evidence says it does nothing.

03What we will not do

The lines this project does not cross

No undisclosed paid promotion

The FTC Endorsement Guides treat an undisclosed material connection as deceptive, and every major community platform bans it. No proposal requiring an undisclosed placement gets funded, regardless of how well it would work.

No impersonation

No sock puppets, no fake accounts, no pretending to be an unrelated satisfied user, and no posting as though this project were someone else. The name is the asset; faking its adoption would poison the measurement anyway.

No fabricated evidence

No invented metrics, no mocked-up screenshots of other companies’ products, no self-published case study presented as an audit. If a number is on this site it has a source and a date, or it is marked as unavailable.