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Spotlight badge is one of the 28 app marketplace metrics and concepts defined in the AppRanks glossary. This page gives you a clear, plain-language explanation of what Spotlight badge means, why it matters when you evaluate an app, how AppRanks calculates and verifies it, and exactly where you will see it across our public app, audit, and comparison pages. Read on for the full definition, practical use cases, and links to related terms so you can interpret Spotlight badge with confidence.
Also known as: Atlassian Spotlight, Spotlight app, editorial spotlight, marketplace spotlight, Atlassian editorial pick
The Spotlight badge is Atlassian Marketplace's curated-editorial designation, awarded to apps Atlassian's marketplace team selects for visibility in the rotating featured rails on Atlassian's homepage and category browse pages. Unlike the algorithmic Bestseller and Rising Star badges, Spotlight is editorially chosen — Atlassian highlights apps for thematic reasons (a security focus, an accessibility milestone, a recent major launch) rather than pure sales velocity. The badge is publicly visible on the listing tile, on the app's detail page, and inside Atlassian's category leaderboards, and it disappears when Atlassian rotates a fresh cohort in (typically every 4-6 weeks; some thematic Spotlights run shorter). AppRanks tracks Spotlight assignments via Atlassian's `?marketingLabel=` URL parameter and surfaces gain/loss events in the app's Featured Placements section with the exact crawl date. The Shopify-side analogue is the editorial Staff Pick rail and the New & Noteworthy collection; the AppRanks data model unifies both under a single "editorial featured" event type so cross-platform comparisons stay clean.
Spotlight is the highest-quality discovery signal on Atlassian Marketplace because it bypasses the install-volume bias that dominates the Bestseller leaderboard. New apps with strong differentiation can land on Spotlight in their first month; Bestseller typically takes 6-12 months of consistent install velocity. For developers, getting on Spotlight is the fastest path from zero to marketplace visibility — and tracking when competitors land it surfaces what Atlassian's marketplace team is currently rewarding (a security focus, an industry-vertical push, etc.).
AppRanks polls Atlassian Marketplace's category endpoints with `?marketingLabel=spotlight` daily. Apps appearing under that filter get a Spotlight=true marker stamped against the snapshot date. When a subsequent crawl no longer surfaces the app under the filter, AppRanks records a Spotlight-loss event with the inferred date range. Refresh cadence: every 24 hours, UTC midnight, with hourly retry on transient marketplace errors.