Retrieval Benchmark
How Wheel of Heaven measures AI information penetration — the quarterly benchmark of whether the corpus appears in AI answers' retrieval and citation chains.
On this page
Wheel of Heaven’s distribution goal is not pageviews but pathways: the number of information routes that eventually traverse the corpus — including answers a reader never sees the source of, because an AI assistant retrieved and synthesized it. The retrieval benchmark measures progress toward that goal.
What it measures#
Information penetration — the share of relevant informational questions for which Wheel of Heaven appears anywhere in an AI answer’s retrieval/citation chain. This is the project’s north-star KPI: pathways traversed, not pages viewed.
Method#
- Cadence: quarterly (Feb / May / Aug / Nov). Each run is a dated file in the project’s
plans/benchmark-runs/. - Surfaces: Google web search (an automatable proxy for RAG retrieval), plus ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude with web search. Manual surfaces get one pass per run; each question is asked verbatim, no follow-ups.
- Recorded per (surface × question): whether the corpus was cited, which page, position among citations, competing sources, and whether the corpus’s position was represented accurately.
- Scores per run: penetration % per surface and overall; accuracy % among citations; a competitor-frequency table (who wins where the corpus doesn’t).
The question set is fixed and versioned. Questions are asked as written — no “wheelofheaven” hints except in the project-direct category, which measures brand retrieval rather than topical retrieval — and are never tuned toward known strengths between runs. Additions get a version stamp; questions are never silently removed.
Question set (v1 — 50 questions, 7 categories)#
| Category | Count | Measures |
|---|---|---|
| Canon-internal | 8 | Raëlian doctrine, the Elohim, the embassy |
| Comparative mythology | 12 | Flood myths, divine councils, Watchers/Nephilim |
| Precession / world ages | 6 | Ages, the Great Year, Hamlet’s Mill |
| Primary texts | 8 | Gilgamesh, Enûma Eliš, Enoch, Theogony |
| Authors / figures | 6 | Sendy, Sitchin, von Däniken, the plural Elohim |
| Structured data | 5 | Machine-readable / CC0 comparative-mythology data |
| Project-direct | 5 | Brand retrieval for “Wheel of Heaven” |
2026-Q3 baseline (web search)#
| Category | Present | Penetration |
|---|---|---|
| Project-direct | 4 / 5 | 80% |
| All others | 0 / 45 | 0% |
| Overall | 4 / 50 | 8% |
The baseline’s findings shaped the subsequent work:
- Brand retrieval resolves to the GitHub org and the legacy
.iodomain, not.world— only one.worldURL surfaced in the entire run. The.ioGitHub Pages source was subsequently neutralized to a redirect. - Dataset queries return nothing that serves the intent — from anyone. The comparative-mythology datasets and their landing pages were aligned with the query language the benchmark used.
- Wikipedia is weaker competition than expected; the recurring competitors are the Christian-apologetics cluster, the Heiser divine- council ecosystem, and fringe/new-age precession sites.
- Several open lanes with no credible competition (Council of Eternals, Watchers-vs-Nephilim, the twelve world ages) are candidate content targets.
Movement in the comparative and primary-text categories over successive quarters is the signal that the knowledge-system strategy is working.