Six weeks ago I published a piece arguing that World’s 50 Best doesn’t measure what it claims to. Today, the company deleted the one word that made the claim in the first place.

World’s 50 Best is becoming The 50. Restaurants, bars, hotels, vineyards and travel planning platforms, in their own words, were already one company under one name, World’s 50 Best, long before today. What is actually new is a single unified website and a new visual identity built around a gemstone made of fifty pieces. What changed less than the announcement makes it sound is the substance: the same structure, the same everything, with the one word that made a claim, Best, quietly deleted.

My piece was called “Best, Popular, or Just Well Funded?” It argued that the ranking never measured what it claimed to. A third of the vote goes to journalists, and journalists mostly vote for who flew them out. A third goes to chefs, who reward peer respect earned in cities everyone already passes through. A third goes to well-travelled gourmets, who vote for whatever they can afford to eat often enough to have an opinion about. Money, geography and price decide most of it. Quality is the floor, not the differentiator.

This isn’t a view I invented. People in food circles have said versions of it quietly for years, at dinners and on press trips, rarely in print. No single article moves a company like this. What moves it is independent voices saying the same true thing often enough, in public, that it becomes harder to ignore than to fix. And it’s still something to watch a company quietly concede a point an entire industry has been making under its breath.

You don’t drop “best” from a brand you’re confident is measuring the best. You drop it when the word has started to cost you more credibility than it buys, when enough people in the industry have started asking the question out loud, the way we always have.

The new name itself doesn’t hold up any better than the one it replaced. I spent seventeen years as an AD in branding at McCann, Ogilvy and Publicis before I moved into food, so I’ll say this as someone who has sat in those rooms: a brand name is supposed to carry something. A personality, a promise, a set of values, some hint of what you stand for. The 50 carries a number. That’s it. The 50 of what, exactly? Restaurants, bars, hotels, vineyards and travel planning platforms, all thrown under one figure with no noun attached and nothing said about what is being counted, or why, or on what basis. “Best” at least made a claim. It was a claim I spent a whole article arguing they couldn’t support, but it told you what the thing was for. A bare number tells you nothing at all. It’s not a correction of an overreaching brand; it’s the absence of a brand.

And the number is wrong before it even starts. Every one of these rankings publishes an extended list every year, fifty-one to a hundred, hotels included, restaurants included. The organisation itself doesn’t believe there are only fifty worth naming. It publishes a hundred, and then puts fifty in the name, without ever saying on what basis those fifty were chosen. Best, popular, or just well funded, the new name doesn’t answer the question any better than the old one did. It just stops asking it. Makes you wonder whether anyone with real branding experience was actually in the room when they signed off on it.

Then you visit the new site, and it turns out the word never left. The About page says they connect people to the world’s best hospitality. The scholarships are still called The 50 Best Bars Scholarship and The 50 Best Restaurants Scholarship. The URLs still read best-in-the-world. So “best” hasn’t been reconsidered at all. It has simply been taken off the sign and left running through everything underneath, which is a stranger decision than either keeping it or dropping it properly. If you still believe the claim, make it. If you no longer do, stop making it everywhere except the masthead.

Nothing about how the list works has changed. The Academy still votes the same way. The journalists, influencers and foodies still get hosted. The gourmets still vote for what they can afford. Only the word promising something the mechanism never delivered is gone. Does that make it more convincing? I don’t think so. If anything, it shows a company that no longer seems to know what its own list is for.

They didn’t need to read my article to reach the same conclusion. But I’ll admit, it’s satisfying to watch the branding catch up to the argument.

Andreja Lajh is the founder of Haut de Gamme, a London-based PR agency working with chefs, restaurants and food producers worldwide. She writes about food, wine and the restaurant world at hautdegamme.net.