Denver shot to the top, meandered in the mediocre middle and scraped the bottom of many lists in 2017.

The Mile High City is the top city to be a homeowner and sell a house. We live in the least-obese state in America. And we’re the No. 2 metro area for beer drinkers, thanks to Coors, 70-plus craft breweries and the Great American Beer Festival. Denver also received a shout-out this year from one of the best of the best lists: U.S. News & World Report named Denver the second-best place to live in the country.

But not all mentions were positive. Denver is the worst city to find love, with the city being “home to the most passive men in America,” says The Great Love Debate podcast. Also, we are ranked 107th out of 125 cities for fastest mobile data speeds. (That’s not good.)

For better or worse — or, in this case, for data-driven research or publicity hunters — Denver and Colorado are showing up on more lists. There are reasons behind the rise. A big one is that there are, quite simply, more lists, said the listmeister himself, Bert Sperling, who since the 1980s popularized some of the nation’s most talked-about lists. Sperling’s “Best Places to Live”-type lists were featured in Money magazine for years.

“These types of lists fit perfectly with the whole distribution of content on the internet, not only because they’re easy to understand, but you have this voluminous amount of information available,” said Sperling, whose website BestPlaces publishes about six or seven lists a year.

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“You can find anything you want,” he said. “But the problem you have is you’re trying to get a drink of water from a fire hose. People are depending on lists and rankings as shortcuts to distill expert knowledge.”

Best cities for people with disabilities? Denver’s at No. 3, which takes into account the number of doctors per capita and accessible parking spots, according to WalletHub. Top tech markets? Cushman & Wakefield ranks Denver eighth due to the number of jobs, leasing and people with college degrees. Healthiest cities? No. 7, says the American Fitness Index, which looked at park acreage, farmer’s markets and the number of vegetables people eat a day.

Some lists aim to maximize the impact. Autolist, for one, ranked the most affordable cities to buy a used car. In November, Denver sat at No. 693 in the nation. It appears to do much better from this perspective: The city ranked fifth in Colorado.

There are other lists where Denver was oddly missing. The city failed to break the top 25 of Glassdoor’s annual Best Cities for Jobs. Denver also didn’t make the nation’s top 25 cities for drinking water. But we’re OK with being absent from this one: The 30 Most Dangerous Cities in America 2017.

Many lists don’t return, giving Denver no chance to redeem itself. Last year, RoC Skincare ranked Denver the second-most wrinkle-prone city in America. RoC Skincare cited less protection from ultraviolet rays in the Mile High City. Indeed.com, a job site, ranked Denver as the “Least Happy Major Metros in the U.S.” for having the nation’s lowest levels of job satisfaction in 2016.

“We can’t offer you any comment about Denver because we did not update the report in 2017,” an Indeed.com spokeswoman said.

WalletHub, which churns out data-driven research and lists (at a rate of nearly twice a week so far this year), hasn’t seen a noticeable rise of Denver on its lists. That’s because the company typically tracks the largest 150 cities, so Denver is always included. WalletHub ranked Denver as the eighth best city to start a career and retire — separate lists, of course. But the city also landed in the bottom half for holiday budgets and greenest cities — also separate lists.

“No evidence from our studies suggest that (Denver or Colorado are ranking higher than the past), especially considering the studies we did five years ago and the ones we do now are largely not the same,” said Jill Gonzalez, a WalletHub analyst.

Sperling says if you’re planning a life decision based on a list, just be wary of where the data comes from.

“What we find is that a lot of places are jumping on it. They’ll get a few indicators, put them together, and it might be a fun one, might even be the worst places to live, or the most drunk, or most miserable cities. Anything to get someone to click on it and get eyeballs,” Sperling said. “They are being overused, misused, abused or however way you want to term it.”

But overused or abused is plenty entertaining when it comes to Denver landing national honors. Denver was the No. 1 city in which to look for love online on “Dating Sunday,” a term coined by Match.com for the first Sunday each year because memberships spike as singles resolve to find love. But, also according to Match.com, there was limited success: Denver ranked 12th for matches made last Jan. 1, a Sunday.

Maybe that’s because Denver is also the worst city to find love, according to the Great Love Debate Podcast. Brian Howie, host of the podcast, said his team, after doing 11 shows in Denver and talking to more than 4,000 men and women, ranked the city the worst.

“The men in Denver aren’t just passive, they’re indifferent,” Howie said. “And the women there need to demand more from them!”

Such lists are meant to drum up publicity. And Howie’s sure did. Milwaukee was named the best city to find love, which was picked up as stories in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, OnMilwaukee.com, Milwaukee’s Channel 4, Milwaukee Record, Milwaukee radio station KISS FM and other media outlets.

Other listmakers say they do it to get people thinking. SmartAsset, the company behind many real estate data-based lists, also looks for trends that turn housing costs or job satisfaction into something fun.

“If you want to spend more time drinking craft beer, you need money left over after you pay for housing,” said AJ Smith, SmartAsset’s vice president of financial education. (Denver tied for seventh last year on the company’s Top 10 Cities for Beer Drinkers).

If anything, Smith just hopes the lists get people thinking and talking.

“All of our lists are really data driven,” she said. “Our mission is to get people to talk about numbers and not just say, ‘Oh, my cousin says it’s a good time to buy a home. Maybe I will!’ ”

Where did Denver rank in 2017?

Where did Colorado rank in 2017?