Most carpet has fiber information that includes tests that tell you the wear quality. One such test is the Vetterman drum test. The test reports on results of over five thousand revolutions of a cleated ball over carpet, which is equivalent to about five years of residential traffic. This can give you a performance measure on the carpet.
Every carpet has a backing, the foundation on which a carpet is built and on which it functions over its entire life. Backing has a direct bearing on carpet's life, beauty and softness. They are engineered not only for these reasons but also to keep carpet wrinkle-free and increase its dimensional stability, that is to say, its shape and pattern for the long run.
As a mainstream fiber, olefin has certainly reached a new peak in a patterned broadloom we saw recently boasting one million "points" per square inch (points being individual tufts). The result is a very dense and durable product. Olefin has always been very stain resistant but was too often relegated, unnecessarily so, to less expensive carpets. Nowadays, olefin is available at many price points and in a range of qualities including permanently built-in stain protection softness.