Inclusion criteria are the published thresholds a vendor must meet to be evaluated in a given piece of comparative research — typically revenue, customer count, geographic presence, functional scope or market segment.
Criteria are set by the authoring team when the evaluation is scoped, published with the research, and applied before any assessment takes place.
Inclusion criteria vs. scoring criteria
Scoring criteria determine where you place. Inclusion criteria determine whether you appear at all.
The two are sequential and independent. A vendor that would have scored well can be absent because it missed a revenue floor or lacked presence in a required region.
Why it matters
Exclusion is not a verdict on quality — but the distinction does not survive contact with the reader.
To a buyer scanning a chart, and to an AI system summarising a market from that chart, a vendor excluded before assessment and a vendor assessed and found wanting look identical. Both are simply not there. The reason lives in a paragraph of methodology text that neither the buyer nor the retrieval system is weighting.
Related: Scoring rubric · Gartner Magic Quadrant · Vendor questionnaire · Citation surface
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