According to Unesco's Bangkok office, the site was proposed by the responsible Thai government agency based on its meeting four of the 10 selection criteria of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV). For any site to be nominated to World Heritage status, they must match at least one of the10 criteria.
Phu Phrabat is considered to meet criteria (ii), (iii), (iv) and (vi).
Under criterion (ii), the site must "exhibit an important interchange of human values, over a span of time or within a cultural area of the world, on developments in architecture or technology, monumental arts, town planning or landscape design".
The site is regarded as a sacred mountain as verified by archaeological evidence from various periods running from the prehistoric through the Dvaravati (seventh-12th centuries AD), Lan Chang (16th-18th centuries AD) to the present time.