I cannot prove manipulation, but after tracking WordPress.org theme rankings for a long time, some movements are statistically hard to justify. Several themes on the first 3 pages of the Popular Themes list repeatedly gain or lose 6 to 16 positions while showing the same characteristics: - no updates for 1 to 2 years - almost no reviews or a few bad ones - no support topics Examples: wordpress.org/themes/envo-ro… wordpress.org/themes/envo-on… wordpress.org/themes/futurio… wordpress.org/themes/popular… wordpress.org/themes/spacr/ When you compare these side by side with neighboring themes in the rankings, the difference is obvious. Those other themes typically have frequent updates, dozens or hundreds of reviews, and active support forums. Anyone who has built and maintained a WordPress theme knows how hard it actually is to climb this list. It takes years of consistent updates, ongoing support work, good reviews, and steady adoption. Adding third-party usage data makes this even harder to explain. Inspiro (my theme) has ~70k active installs on wp.org and is detected on ~10,000 real websites according to themesinfo.com. Envo Royal has ~30k installs, yet is detected on only ~370 real websites ⚠️. An enormous gap like this suggests that “active installs” do not reliably correlate with real-world usage. At this point, a review of how these themes' jumps occur would help clarify whether the Popular list reflects real adoption, especially when compared to themes with active users and ongoing maintenance.