A very interesting recent paper by Dalvi et al. has demonstrated convincingly with adhesion experiments of a soft material with a hard rough material that the simple energy idea of Persson and Tosatti works reasonably well, namely the reduction in apparent work of adhesion is equal to the energy required to achieve conformal contact. We demonstrate here that, in terms of a stickiness criterion, this is extremely close to a criterion we derive from BAM (Bearing Area Model) of Ciavarella, and not very far from that of Violano et al. It is rather surprising that all these criteria give very close results and this also confirms stickiness to be mainly dependent on macroscopic quantities. •We derive a stickiness criterion from the simple Persson and Tosatti theory of adhesion of rough solids.•We derive another stickiness criterion from the BAM (Bearing Area Model) theory of Ciavarella.•We compare the two derived new criteria with that Violano et al., and Pastewka and Robbins and Muser.•We find Persson–Tosatti, BAM, and Violano criteria give very close results, and are mainly dependent on macroscopic quantities, while Pastewka and Robbins and Muser criteria differ from the previous three in that they depend on the truncation of the spectrum of roughness.