Triathlon bikes › Ranking

1. Real listings only

Every bike on this site was read off a German retailer's own product page during the last run (08:40 today). Nothing is hand-entered and nothing is invented. Where a retailer does not publish a fact, we say "not stated by the shop" rather than filling it in.

We ingest the whole triathlon bike range each shop sells, €4,199 to €13,999 in the current dataset, and only then filter down to the budget bands shown on the homepage. The price range belongs to you, not to us.

2. What we score, and what we do not, yet

For road bikes, gravel bikes, mountain bikes and city bikes we fit a curve across that category's own live inventory, what German shops are charging right now for each equipment level, and name, per budget, the bike that sits furthest below it. For triathlon bikes we do not.

Not out of laziness: the scoring is a set of point tables, and a point table only means anything for the market it was checked against. For triathlon bikes too little of what a bike costs can be explained that way so far, and a wrong number is worse than no number.

So for triathlon bikes we fit no market curve at all. There is no hidden value score we are merely declining to show: there is none. What you get is the stock the shops actually have, in your size, with the components we could confirm, cheapest first inside each budget. When we can rank triathlon bikes reliably, the ranking will be described here.

3. It has to be buyable, in your size

A bike can only win a band if a frame size compatible with one you picked is confirmed in stock at that retailer, at a price we read off that retailer's own page. Where a shop prices per size, the price shown is the price of the size you can buy.

You can tick more than one size, from either scale or both: riders straddle sizes, and the same rider is an L at one brand and a 58 at the next. That widens the field rather than loosening the test: each size you pick is checked under exactly the same rules it would have faced on its own, a bike qualifies if it fits any of them, and the card tells you which one it fits. Picking three sizes never turns a letter into a centimetre we would otherwise refuse to convert.

Centimetre sizes are compared directly (±1.5 cm counts as a fit and is labelled as equivalent). A letter size is only translated into centimetres where somebody who knows the bike said so: the shop printing the manufacturer's own dual label ("XL = 58 cm"), a mapping we read out of the manufacturer's own documentation and cite (Focus Izalco Max, Focus Paralane, Giant TCR/Propel/Defy/Contend), or a ladder harvested from many such dual labels (none).

For Canyon, Trek, ROSE, Lapierre, Liv, BH, Ridley, Merida, Wilier, Colnago, Megamo, Bulls we looked and did not find enough to stand behind, so their bikes appear when you pick a letter size rather than a centimetre one. The commonest reason is that the only centimetre figure a manufacturer publishes is a tube length, which is a different thing from a size name: Giant's own chart puts its L at a conventional 58–60 and gives it a 55.5 cm seat tube. Reading the tube as the size would send you a frame two sizes out, so where we cannot tell the difference we say nothing. A wrong size is worse than a missing option.

4. The same bike at several shops

Listings are merged into one product only on brand, model, drivetrain and model year, or on a shared manufacturer barcode. Two trims, two drivetrains or two model years never merge. Where we are not certain, the listings stay separate and no "same bike cheaper here" claim is made.

5. Where AI is and is not used

Component text is parsed deterministically first. A language model is consulted only for fields that deterministic parsing could not resolve, and any value it returns is discarded unless it comes with evidence quoted verbatim from the retailer's own text. The model never chooses the winner, never decides that two bikes are the same, never converts a size, and never contributes a number to the ranking.

No sentence you read here was written by a model. The descriptive paragraph that used to sit on the bike page repeated what the spec line and the facts list above it already said; it was dropped when the site became bilingual.

The review page shows every record, every warning, every size decision and the provenance of every fact. It is in English on purpose: it is our tool, not yours.