About Every18
Every18 is a free golf course directory covering every course in the United States, public and private, with consistent, editorially independent ratings across distance, cost, quality, and difficulty. Unlike tee-time booking platforms, Every18 has no booking agenda: the ratings are never influenced by commercial relationships with courses, and no course pays to appear or rank higher.
What Every18 Does
Every18 maps and rates golf courses using a consistent methodology applied across all 50 states. Each course entry includes distance from your location, an estimated green fee range, an editorial quality rating, and a difficulty score. The illustrated course layouts are generated from OpenStreetMap geographic data and USDA aerial imagery, not promotional photography from the courses themselves. This means what you see is what the course actually looks like, not a marketing shot.
The Data
Course geometry is derived from OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Aerial imagery is from the USDA National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP), which is public domain. Ratings are editorial estimates, not scraped from review aggregators or influenced by course operators.
No Booking Agenda
Most golf course discovery tools are tee-time booking platforms in disguise. Their recommendations are shaped by which courses pay commissions or advertising fees. Every18 earns nothing from bookings and takes no commission on play.
Revenue comes from three places: affiliate links in the Gear section, display advertising, and services sold to courses themselves (3D flyovers, course map licences and green topography sheets), priced openly on the for-courses page. That last one is a real financial relationship with a course, so the firewall around it is worth stating plainly: buying anything from Every18 changes no rating, no ranking, no placement, and does not decide whether a course is listed or indexed. Every course in the country is already covered, and the ratings are computed the same way whether a course has ever spoken to us or not.
Who Built This
Every18 was built by a golfer who was frustrated by the same problem: trying to find a course in an unfamiliar area without wading through booking platforms, outdated review sites, or course-operated marketing pages. The goal is a single, honest, fast reference for the 25+ million golfers in the United States.
Contact
Questions, data corrections, or feedback? Email contact@every18.com. Course data errors are especially welcome. If a rating seems wrong or a course is missing, let us know.
* As an Amazon Associate, Every18 earns from qualifying purchases · affiliate links