An index that ranks named companies owes its readers a record of every change it makes. This page is that record: what changed, why, and what triggered it. Scores are never adjusted by hand — only re-measured — and revenue changes always carry a source.
Found something wrong that is not listed here? Tell us — corrections with a public source get applied and logged.
On August 6 one company that does not appear on any MDM 2026 list was added to the index universe as an editorial addition — unranked, revenue recorded as not disclosed, no Digital Readiness Index score — alongside two companion posts. The company asked us to take the coverage down, and we did: it is out of the index universe, its platform detection is out of the dataset, and both posts are unpublished. Nothing measured or ranked changes, because an unranked, unscored entry fed no cut: company count goes from 224 to 223, and the platform-detection set from 77 storefronts to 76. Every other company in the index charts on a published MDM list, so this was the only entry that could be withdrawn this way.
The index now records what each company's storefront is built on. Detection runs in two tiers and nothing is published on one tier alone. Tier 1 fingerprints the storefront itself — homepage, a sampled product page and a site-search results page, matched against a signature dictionary over the raw HTML, the asset URLs the page loads, the response headers and the Set-Cookie names; every hit saves the string that matched and the URL it matched on. Twenty-one storefronts never showed a standard HTTP client a page at all, so twelve of those were read in a supervised Chrome session instead, scored against the same dictionary. Tier 2 sent one agent per vendor family across the public record — vendor customer lists, case studies, press releases, partner write-ups and job postings — for independent corroboration, and every claim it returned was re-checked by a second agent instructed to refute it; six of forty-one claims died there, all on dead or mismatched URLs. A platform is labelled 'confirmed' only where the fingerprint and an independent public source agree (11 commerce platforms, 2 search vendors). Where only the storefront shows it, the value is published as 'detected' (15 commerce, 8 search) and says so. Where only a vendor says it and we could not read the storefront, the claim is kept in the dataset as 'reported' and is not stated as fact (15 commerce, 7 search). Two corrections fell out of building this. Ferguson's storefront fingerprints as Salesforce B2C Commerce (Demandware), not the B2B Commerce product its 2021 Salesforce press release is usually read as implying — both are recorded. And an early pass mislabelled Reece USA as running Optimizely B2B Commerce on the strength of an /api/v1/sessions call; that endpoint belongs to Okta, Reece's SSO provider, and the signature was narrowed before anything shipped. CMS and CDN/bot wall are directly observable from the response and are reported as observed rather than held to the two-sided rule.
Companies affected: Ferguson · Linde (Americas) · F.W. Webb · Distribution Solutions Group · TricorBraun · Van Meter Inc. · IEWC · WPG Americas · Schaedler Yesco Distribution · Indiana Oxygen · Aramsco · E&T Plastics · Total Plastics International
The 203 teardowns published in the 2025 wave quoted MDM's 2025 placements and FY2024 revenue. Nothing in them was false — every claim was attributed to the 2025 report — but the series hub and the index had moved to the 2026 lists, so the posts contradicted the rest of the site and answered 'where does this company rank' with last year's number. All 203 were updated against the published index: report year, every rank, and every revenue figure with its fiscal year and source. Where a company moved more than trivially the post now says so — Applied Industrial slipping from No. 1 to No. 2 in Fluid Power, IEWC rising from No. 38 to No. 28 in Electrical — because the movement is the part worth re-reading. The ten companies that left the lists were rewritten in the past tense and, where they were acquired, name the acquirer. Four corrections were made that predate this refresh: EIS was described as ranking No. 34 in Specialty Adhesives when that rank belongs to Industrial Supplies and the adhesives list is unranked; Graybar was said to sit behind three companies when at No. 3 only two are ahead of it; Graybar and Southern Counties Lubricants cited the 2025 report PDF for 2026 figures; and White Cap described the Colony Hardware combination as pending after it closed on February 6, 2026.
Companies affected: EIS Inc. · Graybar · Southern Counties Lubricants · White Cap · DNOW · Wajax Corp
The Wajax teardown said its revenue was a figure 'MDM pegs at' — first $626M, then $1.5B after the refresh. Neither is MDM's number. MDM's 2026 report prints $638M for Wajax, a figure covering only Industrial Parts and ERS; our $1.5B is total company revenue converted from the CAD $2,145.3M in Wajax's own FY2025 annual results. The post now states the figure, cites Wajax directly, and notes what MDM printed instead. This is the failure mode the index is least able to afford — the number was right and the attribution was wrong — so verify-playbook-refresh.mjs now checks every teardown for prose that credits MDM with a figure MDM did not print.
Companies affected: Wajax Corp
The index universe is now the 2026 MDM Top Distributors report (20 sector lists, ranked on FY2025 sector revenue) rather than the 2025 edition. Twenty companies joined and ten left, and 99 of the 193 returning companies changed placement on at least one list. Sector membership and rank are now read from a transcription of the report itself rather than parsed out of a placement string, so a rank exists in one place instead of two. Companies that charted in 2025 and not in 2026 keep their teardowns and their index rows — people still search for them, and most left by being acquired rather than by shrinking — but they are marked as off the current lists and collected in a 'No longer on the lists' section on the Playbooks hub. No company was re-measured in this pass: every Digital Readiness Index score, and the median of 58, is unchanged from the August 2026 measurement. The twenty entrants carry no score at all. Four of them — Johnstone Supply, D&H Distributing, Charbone and Apex Oil — land inside the published measurement set (every company ranked in the top five of any sector list) and are queued for sampling in the next quarterly run. The other sixteen sit outside that set and will not be measured, which is the rule working as stated rather than a backlog. The refresh also moved three companies that were already in the index into the measurement set for the first time — TTI, White Cap and Network Distribution each rose into a sector top five — so seven companies now await a first score.
Companies affected: Franklin Empire · Dakota Supply Group (DSG) · Eckart Supply · Rural Electric Supply Cooperative (RESCO) · Carter-Jones Lumber · McCoy's Building Supply · Johnstone Supply · Mingledorff's · Industrial Piping Specialists · The Macomb Group · D&H Distributing · Total Safety Supplies & Solutions · NFI Industries · Charbone Corporation · Tricon Energy · United Natural Foods (UNFI) · The Chefs' Warehouse · Apex Oil · Guttman Holdings · Mansfield Energy · MRC Global · Loeb Electric · Schaedler Yesco Distribution · Locke Supply Co. · Edges Electrical Group · GMS Inc. · Kodiak Building Partners · Arbill · Levitt-Safety · BradyPlus
Transcribing the 2026 report surfaced three figures we do not reproduce as printed. MDM's MRO Industrial page lists W.W. Grainger at $179B, which would make it larger than Cardinal Health; every other list in the same report prints $17.9B, and that is what we publish. MDM prints two different totals for Motion in the same report — $8.9B on six lists and $8.7B on the Fasteners list — and we use $8.9B. MDM again prints Brenntag North America at $17.8B, which is Brenntag Group's global revenue; our corrected $6.5B North America figure from the FY2025 annual report stands. Each deviation is recorded alongside the printed figure in the transcription rather than silently swapped.
Companies affected: W.W. Grainger · Motion (Genuine Parts Company) · Brenntag North America
SRS Distribution, The Home Depot's specialty-distribution subsidiary, completed its acquisition of Mingledorff's on May 11, 2026, adding the HVAC wholesaler's 42 southeastern locations. MDM's 2026 HVACR list carries Mingledorff's at #7 and notes the acquisition. The row stays in the index because people search for it, but like every absorbed entity it is excluded from the revenue ranking so the combined business is not counted twice. Its last independently reported figure, $1.0B for calendar 2024, is shown with that fiscal year attached.
Companies affected: Mingledorff's · SRS Distribution
Of the twenty companies new to the 2026 lists, thirteen have a revenue figure carrying a fiscal year and a source URL, and seven rank in the undisclosed tier. Four of the thirteen are third-party estimates and are badged as such: Apex Oil, Guttman Holdings and Mansfield Energy from Forbes' America's Largest Private Companies, and NFI Industries likewise. Tricon Energy is published at MDM's $14.0B FY2025 rather than Forbes' $13.0B FY2024 — MDM's own research sits above third-party estimators in this index's stated source hierarchy, and it is the more recent year; the Forbes figure corroborates the scale and is recorded in the note. Charbone Corporation reports CAD 252,041 of revenue for FY2025 in its own annual results, which is genuinely what a pre-scale hydrogen producer earns; MDM lists it as N/A.
Companies affected: Apex Oil · Guttman Holdings · Mansfield Energy · NFI Industries · Tricon Energy · Charbone Corporation
Wesco International (40), Arrow Electronics (49), Uline (56), and Avnet (57) block standard clients from their product pages, including this index's production extractor. Rather than leave the biggest names in several verticals blank, we added a documented browser fallback: the same five sampled pages, read in a full Chrome browser session, scored by the same frozen rubric. Each of their scorecards discloses the browser measurement, and the Machine & Agent Readiness pillar is still scored from what a standard client can retrieve — for a crawler, the block is the reality. Future Electronics (68) recovered on a plain re-run of the standard pipeline; its July failure was transient. The measured set grew from 32 to 37 companies; the median (58) and median attributes per page (11) did not move.
Companies affected: Wesco International · Arrow Electronics · Uline · Avnet · Future Electronics
An adversarial verification pass tried to refute every 'no public catalog' claim in the index. Sixteen of thirty-three fell: these companies do operate live public product pages, usually on an owned banner storefront the corporate domain never mentions — Consolidated Electrical Distributors sells through Greentech Renewables, Würth Industry through Northern Safety, US LBM through Higginbotham Brothers, Builders FirstSource launched shop.bldr.com, and Rexel's webshop was simply back online after an outage our original run happened to hit. Those rows now read 'not yet measured — catalog verified live,' with the verified URLs recorded. They carry no score this edition because scores are only ever published from samples taken under the five-category sampling rule; they are queued for the next measurement run. The honest 'no public catalog' count is now seventeen.
Companies affected: Rexel (North America) · OTC Industrial Technologies · Wajax Corp · Builders FirstSource · MRC Global · Ben E. Keith Co. · Cencora (formerly AmerisourceBergen) · Cardinal Health · US LBM · Consolidated Electrical Distributors (CED) · Würth Industry North America · Singer Industrial · Hajoca · North American Plastics · SRS Distribution · Breakthru Beverage
A widely-circulated '$17.8B North America' figure for Brenntag — printed even in trade lists — is actually Brenntag SE's global FY2025 sales. The company's own Annual Report 2025 (note 3.24, external sales by country) puts US plus Canada at EUR 5,750.2M, roughly $6.5B at the report's stated average rate. The row now carries the correct North America figure with the annual report as source.
Companies affected: Brenntag North America
All 117 rows that were 'not disclosed' or ranked on a dated figure were re-researched with the requirement that a figure only counts if a source we actually opened states it. Twenty-eight rows gained a sourced figure — including White Cap ($6.1B, company fact sheet), Hajoca ($4.2B), Owens & Minor ($8.0B FY2024, a public company we had simply missed), McNaughton-McKay ($2.2B), Mouser ($4.1B FY2022), SRS Distribution (~$10B in its last standalone year), and Vallen (~$1.9B FY2021) — each labeled with its fiscal year, basis, and estimate/dated flags where they apply. Sixty-six rows were confirmed genuinely private: no credible public figure exists, and they remain honestly undisclosed rather than estimated. The index now ranks 124 companies on disclosed revenue, up from 105.
QXO completed its $2.25B acquisition of Kodiak Building Partners on April 1, 2026; Kodiak is now listed as part of QXO and excluded from the ranking so the combined business is not counted twice. QXO itself is ranked on its reported FY2025 net sales of $6.84B, with a note that the figure predates the Kodiak close. Separately, Imperial Dade and BradyPLUS completed their merger on March 12, 2026 and unified as Imperial Brady (~$10B combined); the BradyPLUS row is retained for reference but unranked. Reece USA's $3.3B was double-checked against a conflicting $5.1B trade figure and confirmed correct — Reece discloses its US segment natively in USD.
Companies affected: Kodiak Building Partners · QXO (formerly Beacon) · BradyPlus · Reece USA
The methodology page described the attribute-depth signal as one point per structured attribute capped at 15. The frozen scorer actually awards half a point per attribute, capped at 15 — a scale calibrated once, before publication, because the earlier scale saturated and stopped discriminating. The page now matches the instrument. No scores changed; the text was wrong, not the scorer.
Rows where bot protection prevented any read were previously labeled 'extraction failed,' which describes our pipeline rather than the situation. They now read 'not observable' everywhere, with the same underlying rule: an unreadable site is never reported as having no data, because we did not observe the data either way. Medline was additionally re-tested in a full browser session and serves a blank page even there; its note now says so.
Companies affected: Medline Industries · QXO (formerly Beacon) · The Hillman Group · The Home Depot (Pro) · Associated Industries