Open VSX search ranking changed on 30 September 2026: what moved

TL;DR: Open VSX search results were reordered on 30 September and 1 October 2026. Almost half of the top-10 positions we track went to a different extension, and the new order has held since 2 October. Listings with more downloads and the search phrase in their display name moved up, and a recent release now counts for less. Open VSX has not announced a change. If your position moved on those two days, your listing is probably not the reason. Treat your positions from 2 October as the new starting point.

What changed in Open VSX search ranking#

VSXRank searches Open VSX for 217 phrases every day and records the position of each result. On a normal day almost nothing moves. On 30 September, most of it did.

The table shows the share of top-50 positions that sat 10 or more places away from where they were the day before.

The first page changed the most. Of the 2,156 top-10 positions on 29 September, only 1,111 (51.5%) were still in the top 10 on 7 October. In the eight days before, 91.7% had stayed.

The VS Code Marketplace did not move with it. There, 96.9% of top-10 positions on 29 September were still top-10 on 7 October. Small daily shuffles are normal on the Marketplace, as our guide to rank jitter explains. This was something else, and only on Open VSX.

What ranks in the top 10 now#

We compared the extensions holding top-10 positions before and after.

The typical top-10 extension now has about twice the downloads, was released less recently, and more often carries the search phrase in its name. Name length barely changed: the median was 16 characters before and 17 after.

Downloads on Open VSX count every update of every version, so a high figure can also mean an old extension with many releases. Our download-count guide covers that.

One search, before and after: markdown#

Markdown All in One has 682,272 downloads on Open VSX and was last released on 16 January 2024. An Open VSX issue had reported that it could not be found for any markdown search.

On 29 September it was at #809 of about 1,140 results for markdown. On 30 September it was at #87, and on 7 October at #141. That is still far from the first page, but it is no longer buried.

The top five changed too:

Four of the five extensions on 7 October have more than 250,000 downloads. Two of the five on 29 September had fewer than 12,000.

What it looked like for one extension#

agsoft.claude-history-viewer is our own extension. Its listing did not change between 22 September and 7 October, so every move below happened with no edit on our side.

It kept or gained where its name matches the phrase closely. It lost ground on claude code, where much larger extensions moved up. Cline, with several million downloads, went from #78 to #26 for that search over the same days.

What Open VSX has said#

Open VSX has not announced a ranking change, and we do not know what happened on its servers on 30 September. Three public facts are relevant:

• On 9 September, two search fixes were merged into the Open VSX code. One made the search weigh an extension's name and display name five times and its tags three times, as the code had always intended. The other made download counts matter for extensions outside the very largest.
• Both shipped in version 1.2.0 on 10 September. The reorder we measured came almost three weeks later.
• Open VSX scores each result on rating, downloads, and release date, with weights the registry can configure. On 4 October a maintainer wrote in the issue above that the weights are still at their defaults and need fine-tuning.

What we measured fits those two fixes reaching every result. The timing gap is unexplained. Since the maintainers plan to tune the weights, another reorder is likely.

What to check for your own extension#

• Date your baseline. Compare positions from 2 October onward with each other. A drop between 29 September and 2 October says little about your listing.
• Look at who moved above you. If they have many more downloads, or the exact phrase in their name, this reorder explains it.
• Check your display name. Is the exact phrase you want to be found for in it? Our keyword guide shows how to choose which phrases to put there.
• Don't rely on frequent releases. A recent release date did less for an extension's position after 30 September than before.
• Wait before a big rename. If the weights are tuned again, positions will shift again. Change one thing, write down the date, and watch for a week.
• Keep the Marketplace separate. None of this applies there.

How we measured#

• Searches: 217 phrases on Open VSX, one search per phrase per day at about 01:00 UTC, default relevance order, up to 1,000 results. That gave about 10,750 top-50 positions a day.
• Moved 10 or more places: an extension in the top 50 for a phrase one day whose position for the same phrase the next day was at least 10 away.
• Downloads and release dates are the values on 7 October for both columns, so the comparison is between two groups of extensions, not two points in time for the same group.
• Exact phrase in the name means the whole search phrase appears in the display name, ignoring case.
• Order against downloads: for each phrase we compared the order of the top 100 results with the same extensions sorted by downloads, on a scale where 0 is no relationship and 1 is the same order. The average was 0.06 on 29 September and 0.15 from 1 October onward. Against release date it went from 0.07 to 0.01.
• Limits: these are 217 phrases, not every search. We read public search results only and cannot see Open VSX's index or settings.

Subscribe to the occasional VSXRank digest to hear when the order changes again.