Distrowatch ranking is just the distros that are more commonly searched on the site. The FAQ says “The page Hit Ranking represents hits per day by unique visitors”. It’s just an attempt to see what’s more popular among visitors.

Yeah, maybe there is a feedback loop where people will click on the top one just to see why it is on top, and in doing so they give the clicks necessary to remain on the top.

So the world is now wasting energy and resources to generate AI content in order to combat AI crawlers, by making them waste more energy and resources. Great! 👍