Star rating30pts
The business's public Google average, scaled directly.
Methodology
One published formula, applied identically to every business in every category and every city on this site. It is never adjusted by hand for a specific business. When the formula changes, the version number changes with it, and every ranking is recomputed under the new version, not patched.
Don't take our word for it: open a real ranking page and recalculate any score on it from the weights below.
The six signals
Five signals add points, weighted out of 100. One signal subtracts, and decays to nothing over time rather than following a business forever.
Star rating30pts
The business's public Google average, scaled directly.
Rating confidence25pts
How many reviews back that average up, on a log scale. This is the signal the worked example above is measuring.
Review volume20pts
Total review count on its own scale, separate from confidence, so a business that clearly dominates its category on review count keeps earning credit for it.
Recent growth15pts
New reviews per day since the last refresh. A business with no prior snapshot yet scores this signal at half credit, neither punished nor rewarded for a history it doesn't have.
Verified operator10pts
A flat bonus for confirming you actually run the business. Never inferred from Google data, only from our own claim process. Proof of operator, not proof of qualification — check the business's own professional registration separately, where its category has one.
Recent negative reviewssubtracted
Recent negative reviews subtract, capped — decaying to zero after 180 days. Unlike the five signals above, this one isn't a fixed weight, because it's built from a small, incomplete sample (Google shows us at most 5 reviews per business). We'd rather under-state this penalty than overstate what we can see.
Scope
The six signals above are the whole of what counts. These are the two things worth stating that are not in them.
Google's Places API returns an average rating and a total review count, but no breakdown of how many 1-star or 5-star reviews a business has, and at most 5 individual reviews per business, not its full history. Our low-review penalty is built from that small visible sample, not a true count of every negative review, and we can't reliably detect purchased or incentivized reviews. We say so here rather than imply a precision we don't have.
Questions
The questions below come up most from two kinds of reader: people checking whether this site is trustworthy, and business owners checking whether we're the ones who wrote a low score about them. Both get the same answer.
The person who publishes these rankings does also sell marketing help to businesses, on this site's for businesses page. Two things make that checkable rather than something you have to take on trust. The formula is published above in full, including every weight, so any ranking here can be recalculated from a business's public Google data by someone who does not believe us. And the only inputs are that public data: there is no field anywhere in the system for "is a client". We do not sell rank, we sell help earning the reviews rank is built from. If you spot a ranking that does not follow from the formula, that is a bug or a lie, and either one is worth telling us about.
Only that whoever claimed the listing controls a phone number or WhatsApp account matching the business. What that does and doesn't prove is stated directly under the signal itself, in the list above.
Four reasons, all of them ours rather than yours. We find businesses by searching Google across a grid of points covering the city, so a listing Google does not return for that category is one we never see. We drop a result whose Google primary type is not the category, which is what keeps a gym out of a physiotherapy list even when Google tags it with both. We drop a business whose Google address does not name a municipality in the city, because we will not claim it is somewhere we cannot show it is. And a listing with very few reviews scores near zero, so it is ranked, just far down. If you think you should be here and are not, that is worth telling us.
Every morning the top 10 in each city are re-read from Google for their star rating and review count, and rescored. Once a week that check widens to the top 15, so a business climbing toward the top 10 is noticed. Recent growth is always measured over at least five days, so a daily check never counts as a week of history. Businesses further down are re-read when a whole city is searched again. Every ranking page shows the date of the refresh behind it, so you never have to take the cadence on trust — read the date.
Nothing here penalises silence. Nobody is removed for not claiming a listing or not replying to us, and the formula does not mark a business down for ignoring it. What does not move on its own is the score itself: review volume and recent growth are both built from new reviews actually arriving, so a listing that stops getting them tends to fall behind a competitor that keeps earning them, not because anything here was adjusted. If you would rather change that than watch it stay flat, getting more reviews explains what that costs.