During last night’s UFC FIght Night 278 event at the Meta Apex in Las Vegas there was some breaking news that the promotion has a new ranking system in the works.

As things stand the official rankings have been based on a voting system using media members, but it seems that the UFC is now going to go in a new direction.

A statement that appeared during last night’s broadcast revealed that the new ranking system would be, “based on measurable performance instead of opinion or popularity.“

It was also noted that the rankings would be, “Designed to reward performance and reflect results inside the Octagon.”

Beyond that there’s little to go on at this stage, though in the past Dana White has expressed an interest in using AI to improve the way that the rankings work.

“Don’t worry, my friend, AI will be here soon and this will all be fixed,” White told a reporter at a post-fight press conference back in 2024. “We get all of these b*ms that know nothing about fighting out of this sh*t, and get AI in here and we can fix all these rankings.”

Also during that year White said during a TNT Sports interview that he’d been speaking to Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg about implementing the new system.

The original intention appeared to have something ready by 2025, but now it seems that it may well happen this year.

It’ll be interesting to see if fans get a thorough insight into what ‘measurable performance’ actually means, whether there will be a bias towards certain fighting styles, and how much impact performance will have on the rankings compared to just the actual fight results themselves.

And it’ll also be intriguing to see whether the new rankings then do directly correlate to who gets a title shot, as the way things are currently there’s no guarantee that being a No.1 contender automatically guarantees a title shot.