How rankings work
Best-match ordering is a fixed formula, not an auction. These are the actual numbers the code uses.
Last reviewed 2026-07-25
The short version
We work out which service category your search is about and which community you need it in, then score every business that genuinely matches. The same search always produces the same order.
What each factor is worth
Maximum points contributed by each factor. Nothing else is added, and there is no hidden term.
| Factor | Max points | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Category relevance | 40 | The strongest signal. A business whose primary category matches what you searched for scores highest; a secondary category scores lower. |
| Location relevance | 20 | A business that names your city in its service area scores above one that only says it covers the whole county. |
| Service relevance | 16 | Whether a specific service the business lists matches the words you used. |
| Search-term relevance | 14 | How much of your wording appears anywhere in the business's own profile text. |
| Verification breadth | 8 | How many distinct verification checks the business has completed. |
| Verification freshness | 6 | How recently those records were reviewed. Older records contribute less. |
| Profile completeness | 6 | Whether the profile actually helps you decide: description, services, hours, photos, contact details. |
| Industry relevance | 6 | Whether the business works with the kind of client you appear to be. |
| Response information | 3 | A small credit for publishing a response-time indicator at all. We do not measure actual response times. |
Businesses that do not match are removed, not demoted
If you search for a service and a business has no relevance to it at all, it is excluded from the results entirely. We would rather show you three genuine matches than pad the page to twenty. That is also why an empty result is a real answer: it usually means we do not have that business listed yet.
Ties are broken predictably
Two businesses with identical scores are ordered alphabetically. Ordering never depends on who was added first, who paid, or chance.
Other sort options
- Recently verified — most recent verification review first.
- External rating — businesses with a rating from a named third party first. Businesses without one sort last rather than being given an invented middling score.
- Alphabetical — exactly that.
Changing the sort never introduces businesses that did not match. It only reorders the ones that did.
Paid placement
Payment has no effect on organic ranking. There is no paid input to the scoring formula at all. A Founding Member membership does not move a business up the page.
If sponsored placements launch later, they will appear in a separate block, be visibly labelled “Sponsored”, and never be described as a best match because of payment. See the advertising disclosure.
Why this matched
Every result explains itself. The sentence under each business is generated from the same factors that produced its score, so the explanation cannot drift from the ranking.