Licence
The Riftrate data is free to use, share and adapt, including commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) licence: credit Riftrate and link to riftrate.com. The underlying sources keep their own terms: GDELT (free with attribution) and the Geopolitical Risk Index (CC BY).
How to cite Riftrate
Text: Riftrate (2026). Riftrate: a daily index of world geopolitical tension. https://riftrate.com (accessed DATE).
@misc{riftrate2026,
title = {Riftrate: a daily index of world geopolitical tension},
author = {{Riftrate}},
year = {2026},
url = {https://riftrate.com},
note = {Data: GDELT Project and Caldara and Iacoviello Geopolitical Risk Index}
}When you quote a reading, give its date: the index is recalculated every day and the latest days can still move by a few tenths of a point as news is added.
Columns
riftrate: the index, 0 (calm) to 100 (crisis);zone: Complacency, Easing, Neutral, Tension or Crisis.- Signals (0–100, higher = tenser):
war,terror,economic,diplomatic,internal(domestic unrest),escalation_momentum,media_tone,gpr. - Market risk indices:
energy,shipping,economies, each a rank from 0 (calmest day since 2017) to 100 (tensest); weights on the methodology page. - Countries:
intensity(% of the country’s news about armed violence, 7 days),share(% of the world’s armed-violence news, weighed by severity),level(0–100 against the country’s own history since 2017),rank.
Every formula is on the methodology page and every source on the sources page. Questions or corrections: contact us.