Methodology

Data sources

Four kinds of public material, and nothing else. News search results from Google News RSS. The publishers' own news feeds — BBC, The Guardian, Sky News, Al Jazeera, CBS News, ABC News, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, France 24, Euronews and CNBC — read as headline, publisher and link only, with no article text stored or reproduced. The official press feeds of the offices these figures hold, among them the White House, the Kremlin, the European Commission, the German Federal Government, the Government of Italy, the Presidency of Brazil, the Prime Minister of Australia, the U.S. Department of Defense and the Office of the Governor of California. And published trip lists, used only for the historical archive.

An item from a publisher or official feed is only used when the figure is named in it, and it is stored with the publisher's name and a link to the original page. There is no flight or aircraft tracking, no private data, no social media collection and no tips: personal posts and photographs remain their authors' property and the platforms forbid automated collection, while live aircraft positions would amount to a real-time location claim, which this site does not make.

Every location and every number on this site can be traced back to a specific headline, and that headline is always linked with its publisher's name.

How locations are extracted

Headlines are read automatically by a language model that separates reports of a person being physically present somewhere — arriving, visiting, speaking, meeting, hosting — from headlines that merely mention a place. Only the first kind can produce a location on the map.

Places are resolved against a fixed city list. Explicit official activity at a named institution counts as presence — for example, the Knesset resolves to Jerusalem and the Pentagon to Washington. Where a source identifies a region or country but not a mapped settlement, the original place name is retained and the map point is labelled as an approximate area. All distances are minimums between reported public appearances, not an actual travel route.

Before a reported location becomes public it must be corroborated: either two different publishers report it, or one trusted major publisher or official institutional source reports it explicitly. Reports that contradict a person's known position by an implausible distance are held back for human review instead of being published.

How the numbers are calculated

• Last reported location: the most recent high-confidence reported appearance that has not been marked as wrong.
• Days since last public appearance reported: today minus the date of that report, in whole days.
• Days since reported abroad: days since the last reported appearance in a country other than the person's home country.
• Distance this week ("at least X km"): the last seven days of reported appearances are ordered by time, and the great-circle (haversine) distances between consecutive cities are added up. Hops under 30 km are ignored, and the result is rounded to the nearest 10 km. It is always shown with the prefix "at least", because it is a minimum between reported points — not flight tracking.
• Coverage tone (7d): the average sentiment score of all headlines about the person in the last seven days.
• Negative share (7d): the share of those headlines whose tone score is strongly negative.
• Controversy Index (7d): the number of headlines in the last seven days multiplied by one plus the negative share, rounded. Figures are ranked from highest to lowest; the movement arrow compares today's rank with the rank seven days ago.
• Converging: two or more tracked figures reported or scheduled in the same city within any three-day window.

Any entry marked wrong after a correction is excluded from every statistic.

Leaderboards

The leaderboards reuse the reported appearances behind the map. Nothing on them is derived from flight tracking, telemetry or any private source.

• Distance: the sum of great-circle distances between consecutive reported places, ignoring hops under 30 km. It is a floor, not a total: travel we have no reporting for is simply missing, and the real route is always longer than a straight line.
• Estimated travel footprint: distance multiplied by an emission factor in kilograms of CO₂ per kilometre for the aircraft the figure is assumed to travel on. The aircraft is shown beside each row.
• Estimated cost of travel: distance divided by the assumed cruising speed, multiplied by a published operating cost per flight hour for that aircraft. It covers operating cost only — no security, staff or ground costs — and each figure's cost source is recorded with the entry.
• Countries visited: distinct countries with at least one reported appearance since 1 January.
• Days since last public appearance: days since the most recent reported appearance. It measures coverage, not circumstances.
• Days abroad: days with a reported appearance outside the person's own country, with the longest unbroken stretch shown alongside. A single day without reporting does not break a stretch.
• Days at leisure properties: days with a reported appearance at a place whose name matches a golf club, resort or private estate on record for that figure. Keyword matching undercounts.
• Reliability index: of the appearances announced in advance, the share later matched by a reported appearance in the same place within a day.
• Tone boards: the same seven-day tone average used by the Controversy Index, read from the critical end and from the favourable end.
• Jet-lag index: time zones between consecutive reported appearances over seven days, estimated from longitude rather than flight data.
• Shared cities: days when two or more tracked figures were reported in the same city. It does not imply that they met.
• Biggest movers: change in Controversy Index position against the ranking seven days earlier.

Assumed aircraft, speeds, emission factors and hourly costs are editorial assumptions, chosen from published reporting on each figure's usual transport and recorded per figure so they can be checked and corrected. Where no defensible figure exists, the cost and footprint boards leave that person out rather than guess. If you have a better source for any assumption, send it through the contact page.

Historical record

The archive reaches back to January 2025. Earlier candidate appearances are extracted from published Wikipedia trip-list rows. A candidate becomes public and contributes to totals when the row contains a direct news citation, or when the row links to the trip-list page itself so the date and place can be checked against the published list. Uncited or ambiguous rows stay hidden for review. The row citation is the primary source; page-linked rows are labelled as coming from the trip list. Historical days carry locations and sources only: no write-up is generated for a day the site did not follow as it happened, and where no published list exists for a figure, their record simply starts with the rolling news coverage.

Portraits and maps

Portrait photographs are used only where the original file is published under a licence permitting reuse — public domain, Creative Commons or an open government licence — and each one names the photographer, the licence and a link to the original file. Where no such file exists, a plain monogram is shown instead. The base map is drawn from OpenStreetMap data; city coordinates come from a fixed list shipped with the site, so viewing a page makes no request to any location service.

Scheduled appearances

Announced future appearances, taken from official schedules and advance news reporting, are shown separately and always labelled as scheduled. They are statements of intent, not reports of presence, and they expire automatically once their date has passed.

Known limitations

Machine-read headlines can be wrong. Coverage is uneven: some countries and some figures are reported far more than others, and state-media schedules may be published late or not at all. A quiet period on the map means only that there was no qualifying coverage — nothing should be concluded from an absence of reports.

Language rules

The site always uses attribution language — "was reported in", "according to coverage from" — and never states where anyone currently is. It makes no claims about anyone's health, safety or motives, uses no nicknames, and refers to people by their formal names.

Corrections

If you believe an entry is inaccurate, use the contact form with the page and the entry concerned. Every report is reviewed by a person, and entries found to be inaccurate are removed from the map and from all calculations.