Introducing CaddyIndex™

Picking a new club shouldn't take a weekend of YouTube reviews and launch-monitor numbers that never quite agree. So we built CaddyIndex™ — an agentic research and grading system that does the reading for you and turns the noise into one comparable number per club.

You can find the full table at /caddyindex. This article walks through what CaddyIndex™ actually is, how the score is built, and how to use it without overreading it.

What CaddyIndex™ actually is

For every club we cover, an AI research agent reads every credible review, lab test and head-to-head comparison it can find on the open web. A scoring system then distils that research into six performance facets — the things that matter when you're shopping a club — and rolls them into a single CaddyIndex™ score from 0 to 100.

Think of it as a research assistant that's read everything for you and handed you a single number to start comparisons from. Not a verdict, a starting point.

How a club gets graded

The pipeline runs in two stages.

Research. An AI agent searches the open web for content about a specific club. Reviews from outlets like Plugged In Golf, Today's Golfer, MyGolfSpy and GolfWRX; robot-test data from buyer's-guide round-ups; head-to-head comparisons against direct competitors. It reads every credible source it can find and pulls out the signals that map to each of the six performance facets.

Grading. A scoring system then turns those signals into 0–100 scores for each facet, applies a confidence gate (more on that below), and rolls everything into a single CaddyIndex™ score.

Both stages are AI-driven. Neither involves a human swinging the club. The output is research synthesis, not a fitting.

The six facets

Each club is scored across the six performance facets that show up most consistently in equipment reviews:

• Forgiveness — how well the club performs on off-centre strikes. MOI, ball-speed retention on toe and heel misses, dispersion stats.
• Distance — carry and total yardage relative to category peers.
• Workability — ability to shape the ball intentionally (draw or fade) versus a one-shot-shape head.
• Feel — tactile feedback at impact. Solid, fast, dampened, harsh.
• Sound — the acoustic signature. Crack, thud, ping, muted.
• Looks at address — head shape, alignment cues, visual confidence over the ball.

The six get rolled into one CaddyIndex™ score so you can compare clubs at a glance without mentally weighting each facet yourself. If you care more about, say, Forgiveness than Distance, sort the table by Forgiveness directly.

What you can do with it

Open /caddyindex and:

• Sort by any facet to find the clubs that are strongest where it matters to you.
• Filter by category, tag (low-spin, max-forgiveness, etc.), year, score range, and condition (New, Like new, Used).
• Expand any row to read the AI's verdict — pros, cons, who it's best for, and who should skip it.
• Click a price to jump to the product page where you can see every retailer carrying the club and the full price history.

What it isn't

We want to be upfront about the limits.

Some specific caveats worth holding in mind:

• It's not variant-aware yet. A driver is graded as a head; we don't currently differentiate by loft, shaft or flex. The price shown on the CaddyIndex™ page is the cheapest variant in stock; your fitted variant may cost more.
• Looks is subjective. Two reviewers can rate the same head 7/10 and 4/10 for looks. We use the consensus where one exists and weight it less aggressively when it doesn't.
• The set is incomplete. We're starting with drivers and expanding into fairways, hybrids, irons, wedges and putters over the coming weeks.
• Confidence gating. When the evidence on a club is thin (fewer reviews, no robot-test data, an obscure model), we hold the published CaddyIndex™ score back rather than overclaim.
• The rubric evolves. Scoring rules will keep changing as we learn what matters most. Clubs may be re-graded as we improve the system or migrate to newer AI models.

What's next

The biggest near-term improvements:

• Coverage expansion to fairways, hybrids, irons, wedges and putters.
• Variant-aware pricing. Right now the CaddyIndex™ page shows the cheapest variant; we want to surface per-spec pricing properly.
• Per-club detail pages. Each club's CaddyIndex™ breakdown — every facet's reasoning, every citation, the full research trail — on its own page rather than just inside the row drawer.
• Better disclosure of evidence depth. A glanceable confidence indicator on each row so you can tell when a score is well-evidenced versus baseline-blended.

Try it now at /caddyindex. If you spot a club we should grade next, let us know.