How the Safety Index works

Every country's score is computed from real news, continuously. No editors, no opinions in the loop — a fixed formula over machine-assessed events. Here is the entire pipeline and the exact math.

Questions, partnerships or data-removal requests: [email protected]

The 0–100 scale

Higher is safer. The scale is divided into six verdict bands — the same colors used on the live map and on every country page:

The pipeline

1. ParseWe continuously collect news from 70+ leading media outlets across the world, around the clock. Duplicates are filtered before analysis.
2. AssessEach news item is assessed by large language models acting as threat-intelligence analysts — drawing on the country's already-known context and on knowledge distilled from vast amounts of previously evaluated news.
3. ScoreThe assessed event feeds a deterministic formula (below): it raises that country's threat level in one category, and the total Safety Index is simply 100 minus the sum of all ten categories.
4. Cool downThreat levels continuously cool toward each country's long-term baseline, so elevated scores fade once the news flow subsides — the map reflects what is happening now, not a permanent stain.

The formula

The Safety Index of a country is:

where T_c is the current threat level in category c, bounded by that category's weight W_c. The ten weights sum to exactly 100, so S always lands between 0 (every category saturated at once) and 100 (no active threats).

Each assessed news event moves one category:

• σ — severity 0–10, assigned by the model;
• m — involvement multiplier: 0.3 for foreign military involvement, 0.7 for a military event in a disputed territory the country de facto controls, 1 otherwise (a war on your own soil weighs more than participation abroad);
• k — single-event impact: 0.15 for military and nuclear, 0.25 for every civilian category. A war saturates its category on sheer report volume; a civil crisis produces a few reports a day, so each one weighs more — while a single headline still can never flip the map alone;
• W_c — the category weight from the table below.

Category weights (W_c)

Σ W_c = 100

Consensus of independent models

Several LLMs assess the same news stream independently, each maintaining its own set of threat levels. The default "Global Consensus" view is the per-category mean:

One model overreacting to a headline gets averaged down by the others. You can switch the map to any single model's lens in the header to see how assessments differ.

Cooling down

Every 5 minutes each category sheds 0.2% of its elevation above the country's long-term baseline — a half-life of roughly 1.2 days. The score is an equilibrium between event inflow and this steady cooling: sustained war coverage keeps a country pinned near its maximum penalties, while a country that merely generates a lot of routine news settles mid-scale instead of sinking to the same floor as an actual war zone. The baseline itself encodes structural, slow-changing risk (long-running conflicts, chronic instability), so a country in an active war does not cool to "safe" during a quiet news day.

Freshness & stability

Scores are recalculated continuously, not on a daily batch. Every country page shows its exact last-updated time and a 30-day trend. A country whose score is not moving carries a “Stable for N days” badge: N counts consecutive days in which the day-over-day score change stayed below 0.5 points. The badge appears from 7 days; a country with confirmed active combat shows a combat marker in the same place instead.

Combat confirmation

The combat marker is the one signal we refuse to take from a single voice. It appears only when two independent AI models, reading separate news reports, both confirm military action on a country's territory within the last 24 hours. When the confirmations stop, the marker goes — its absence means no confirmed report today, not a declared peace.

Boundaries & disclaimer

Map geometry comes from the public-domain Natural Earth dataset (via world-atlas), which draws state boundaries by de facto control rather than legal claim. The boundaries, names and designations shown on this map are carried over from that open dataset as-is. They do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the project's authors concerning the legal status of any country or territory, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.

Hatched areas on the map mark territories from Natural Earth's breakaway and disputed-areas layer (Crimea, Kashmir, Western Sahara and others). They are shown for context only: a disputed territory carries no safety index of its own, and selecting one deliberately opens no country. An event located inside such a territory moves the index of the state that de facto controls the ground — at 70% of the domestic military weight — not the index of the state that holds the claim under UN-recognized borders.

Combat markers, scores and events are generated automatically from publicly available news reporting by AI models, without human verification. They may be wrong, incomplete, mislocated or outdated, and are not statements of fact about any location; scores react to reporting volume as well as events themselves.

Everything on this site is provided "as is", for informational purposes only, without warranty of any kind. The authors accept no liability for any decisions made on the basis of this map. This is not travel, security or legal advice.

See it applied

Is United States safe? Is Japan safe? Is Mexico safe? Is Thailand safe? Is Ukraine safe?

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