How Linksmith reads a golf course.
Linksmith is independent course intelligence. Every figure on the site is computed from public data with a fixed method, so you can trust it and check it. Here is exactly how, metric by metric.
The site cannot be bought into.
No paid placements
We don’t sell tee times, take placement fees, or accept payment to move a course up a list. There is nothing to buy.
Open inputs
Everything starts from public data: scorecards, OpenStreetMap geometry, satellite imagery, and weather forecasts. No private feeds, no black boxes.
Reproducible
The same inputs always produce the same numbers. When a ranking moves, it’s because the data moved: the weather, a corrected scorecard, new geometry.
Four public inputs. Nothing private.
Course scorecards
Par, yardage, course & slope rating, and stroke index for every tee set.
Per-tee, per-holeOpenStreetMap
Hole routings, greens, fairways, bunkers, and water hazards, via the Overpass API.
152 courses mappedEsri World Imagery
The satellite basemap the routings and hazards are plotted over.
≤ 1 m / pixelOpen-Meteo
A 7-day forecast (wind, precipitation, temperature) plus ground elevation.
Refreshed each visitEvery number, derived in the open.
Linksmith Test
A 0–100 read on how demanding a course plays: a single composite of its difficulty.
It measures difficulty, not quality. A hard course is not a “better” course, and this is not a “best courses” ranking. Courses without mapped hazards score that 25% neutrally, never a false zero.
Tee fit
Which tees you should actually play here, since most golfers play too far back.
Guidance, not gospel. If you don’t know your carry we estimate it from your handicap, and when two tees fit within ~120 yards we tell you it’s a judgment call.
Expected score
A realistic score for your handicap from a given tee, on a neutral day.
This is the World Handicap System math: a neutral-day baseline. Wind and your own day do the rest.
Walkability
How hard the course is to walk, not just its length.
Only computed for courses with full hole geometry. Cart-path routing isn’t modeled, so treat it as the walk a fit golfer would feel.
Per-hole wind
Which holes play into, downwind, or across today’s wind.
Uses the dominant daily wind direction; gusts, swirl, and tree lines vary hole to hole.
Hazard maps
Where the sand and water actually are, counted and located on the map.
Only as complete as OpenStreetMap is for that course. A sparse map means sparse data, not a hazard-free course.
Weekend playability
A 0–100 score for how good a day is to actually play.
Wind dominates because it’s what wrecks a round. It’s a forecast, so it moves as the forecast moves.
What we don’t claim.
Credibility means saying where the data stops. These are the honest edges of what Linksmith knows today.
- Coverage isn’t complete. A course without OpenStreetMap hole geometry still has a scorecard, but no map, walkability, or wind read.
- Weather is course-location, not microclimate. We use a single forecast point per course, not an on-property model.
- Playability, tee fit, and walkability are heuristics (v1). They’re hand-tuned and will change as we see more courses, and material changes get noted here.
- Open-Meteo’s free tier is non-commercial; a production launch will move to a commercial weather source.
- Scorecards come from a third-party API and can contain errors. Spot one and we’ll correct it.
Methodology v1 · Myrtle Beach · reviewed May 2026 · built on open data, never paid placements.