How cohorts are built
Cohorts group organizations by sector and size so the comparison is fair, and small cohorts are suppressed.
Last updated September 22, 2026
The Pytheus Index becomes available to your organization once your cohort has enough participants for the comparison to be anonymous. Until then the surface may not appear in your dock. Your Pytheus contact can tell you where your cohort stands.
Benchmarking only helps if the comparison is fair. The Pytheus Index builds peer cohorts deliberately so that your standing reflects organizations facing conditions like yours, not an arbitrary cross-section of every program in the pool.
The cohort dimensions
A cohort is keyed on sector and organization size. Sector matters because regulatory pressure and threat profile differ sharply across industries. Size matters because a small team and a large enterprise operate under different resourcing and complexity, and comparing across that line distorts the result.
Minimum sample size
A cohort only produces a comparison once enough organizations have joined it. Below that minimum sample, the cohort is suppressed: you see a clear "not enough peers yet" state rather than a shaky comparison drawn from a handful of participants. This threshold is what keeps small cohorts from effectively exposing individual members.
Until your cohort reaches the minimum, the Index tells you so plainly instead of showing a number it cannot stand behind. As more peers opt in, the cohort crosses the threshold and your comparison appears.
A suppressed cohort is not an error. It is the Index refusing to publish a comparison that would be neither reliable nor private.
What you see once a cohort is live is covered in Score distribution and Spend benchmarks. The privacy reasoning is in Privacy and suppression.