Looking at the criteria again, I can think of at least three things that arbitrarily exclude large swathes of the small web:

1) The requirement that it needs to be a blog. There's plenty of small-web sites of people who obsess over really wonderful and wacky stuff (e.g., https://www.fleacircus.co.uk/History.htm) but don't qualify here.

2) The requirement that it needs to be updated regularly. Same as above - I get that infrequently updated websites don't generate a "daily morning" feed, but admitting them wouldn't harm in any way.

3) Blanket ban on Substack-like platforms while allowing Blogspot, Wordpress.com, YouTube, etc. Bloggers follow trends, so you're effectively excluding a significant proportion of personal blogs created in the last six years, including the stuff that isn't monetized or behind interstitials. The outcomes are pretty weird: for example, noahpinionblog.blogspot.com is on your list, but noahpinion.blog is apparently no longer small web.

1) It has to have a feed (we dont want to overcrawl) so hence 'blog' - more accurately any site with an RSS/atom feed would do

2) 'Regularly' means posted in the last 2 years to be included

3) Substack has an annoying subcribe popup and ads/popups are against the spirit of what this represents