World Tension Meter — an open observatory

What this is. A public instrument that turns the world's news, markets and public attention into plain numbers — twelve indexes, 197 country scores, a conflict roster and the first daily AI Risk Index — every ten minutes, and keeps every number forever.

Who it is for. Anyone who wants to know, in one look, how tense the world is today and what that means for prices, deliveries and money. Researchers, journalists, businesses and curious people, all on the same free page.

How it is run. By an independent founder team, self-funded, with no advertisers, sponsors, investors or paying customers. See the independence statement.

Make geopolitical risk readable. Not a paywalled terminal, not a think-tank PDF: a number, a colour, a sentence, on a page that loads in a second.

Keep the record. Every daily score since 2026-03-23 is kept, published and never edited. Months are written up once and locked. The archive is designed to outlive the people running it.

Explain, never just score. Every month, every index gets the story behind its number: what moved it, which headlines, what eased it.

1. Independence of engine. The scores come from our own engine reading free public sources. No single provider, company or API can switch this instrument off. When an enhancement source fails, the built-in method carries on and the number still publishes.

2. Free forever. No paywall, no ads, no premium tier, no data sales. The open API and the data portal are free with attribution (CC BY 4.0).

3. Open method. Weights, zones, formulas and lifecycle rules are published on the methodology page. Changes happen only with a versioned engine release, recorded in the changelog. Nothing changes silently.

4. Honesty about limits. Estimated fields are flagged. Older months carry a note when they came from an earlier engine calibration. A number we cannot compute is shown as missing, never invented.

5. Numbers are never written by AI. Language models help classify headlines and write plain-English summaries from facts we already computed. Every score is arithmetic on measured signals, reproducible from the method.

Versioned engine. Every release has a number (currently v4.4.2). The live engine version is printed on every page and in every API response.

Append-only ledger. A day is written once. Corrections, if ever needed, are made as new dated entries with a changelog note, never by rewriting history.

Locked months. A month's story is generated once the month closes and is then frozen.

Conflict roster. Conflicts are tracked from our own corpus; they go dormant after 30 quiet days and retire after 120. New conflicts are surfaced as candidates and added only after human review.

Country pages. Every country has a permanent page and its own news pulse from day one. Pages are released to search engines one per day once the record is 30 days old, roster countries first, and only with real data behind them. Released pages stay released.

AI incident record. Every AI headline the engine weighs at 55 or more enters a numbered, append-only record the day it is read. Nothing in it is ever edited or removed; it is meant to be citable decades from now.

Public status. Engine health, freshness and data sources are visible on the status page at all times.

Open API · Data portal · Methodology · Research · Changelog

Cite as: World Tension Meter (2026). Daily geopolitical risk indexes. worldtensionmeter.com. CC BY 4.0. · Informational only, not advice.