TL;DR Summary: Our data is now much more accurate, we won't bother you with as many emails, but it's still a good idea to verify your events for maximum visibility on the website.
In case you didn't know, TL;DR stands for 'Too Long - Didn't Read'. If you want to know more about what's actually going on, please read on. You might find it interesting, you might learn something about these modern times, and it's definitely not going to help your golf swing!
2026 is very much a learning year for us. We're learning what works and what doesn't through a little bit of trial and error. The end goal is to provide a great service to the players and the clubs by having complete and accurate data. Our initial thought was that we can use AI to extract data, and get humans (you guys) to validate this information by verifying events. This works to a certain extent but not well enough because you guys have got better things to do, and let's face it, us humans are lazy. We're also inundated with emails, so the chances of you actually reading this email and getting this far is about 1 in 10.
So, if you're still with me, here's the new plan. AI will be marking AI's work. Let me explain...
Every week we extract around 8,000 competitions from courses around the world. Many of these are duplicates, and most are not open competitions, so we wouldn't consider listing them. To do this, we crawl the websites, and present pages to Claude AI to analyse. This analysis is fairly straightforward, and we're able to use the cheapest Claude model (Haiku) to do this work. Once this is all complete, we may have a list of 200 or so open competitions that we're going to display on the website.
This much smaller list is then passed back to a more sophisticated AI (Claude Sonnet) to process, and this AI is given permission to follow any relevant links to extract more detail. This is a much more expensive and time consuming process, so will be happening gradually over the next few weeks. Our initial focus will be on UK events as we're in peak golfing season and the UK has the most users. But we will also be processing your course events as a priority. This will almost certainly involve a re-written description with more detail.
So what happens now? Do you still need to Verify events? Ideally, yes, but we won't keep bothering you about them. One notification per event and that's it. You can still log into the website and manage your events there at any time. And remember, a Verified event gets priority listing.
If you're still with me, here's an interesting example of the power of this second pass of the AI.
An event at Maesdu was on our database, but tagged as 'uncertain' so hidden from view. When the AI had a proper look, it came up with this explanation:
Notes: The event date is incorrect — the page and BRS booking system both confirm the Ladies Greensome takes place on Thursday 10 September 2026, not Saturday 12 September 2026 (which is the Diamond Jubilee Trophy). Entry method updated to online as booking is available via BRS Golf. Scoring updated to strokeplay as greensomes is a strokeplay variant. Entry URL added. Max handicap of 36 (ladies) identified from terms and conditions. Description expanded with full eligibility requirements and event details.
It still may not be 100% correct, but with a lack of information on the course websites, the AI has to make a judgement call (for example here, it judged that it would probably be a Strokeplay rather than a Stableford event - but I suspect that is not the case).
