How we measure appointment availability
Our availability pages are built from one simple observation, repeated all day. This page explains exactly what that observation is, so you can judge whether the numbers answer your question.
What we count
A detection is one occasion on which one of our automated checks navigated to the official appointment calendar for a given procedure and province and found at least one bookable slot. Everything on the availability pages is a count of detections, grouped by province and by Madrid-local calendar day.
How often we check
Checks run continuously, but not at a uniform rate: some province and procedure combinations are checked far more often than others, and the rate changes over time. The counts are therefore not an even sample. Two provinces are not directly comparable on volume alone, and a shift in one province's figures can reflect how often we looked as much as what was there to find.
Where a calendar day is marked as not monitored, no check ran for that province that day.
What these numbers do not mean
They are not a count of appointments. A slot that sits unclaimed is found again by every check that runs while it is there, so a single appointment can contribute many detections. They are not a count of appointments remaining, and they cannot tell you whether anything is free right now.
Read a figure as how often appointments were there to be caught in that province, over that period. That is the question the data can answer honestly.
Using this data
You are welcome to quote and republish these figures, including in commercial work, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Please credit Cita Ping with a link to the page you took the number from, and keep the wording "times our checks found availability" rather than describing the figure as a number of appointments.