How We Rank — Methodology

Last updated: 2026-08-11

The short version

We rank local businesses by the quality and the credibility of their Google

rating — not just the star number you see on Google. A perfect 5.0 built from

four reviews isn't really better than a 4.9 built from two thousand. Our ranking

accounts for that.

Why not just sort by Google's star rating?

Google's star rating is a plain average of every review a business has

received. It doesn't matter whether that average comes from 3 reviews or 3,000 —

both can show as "5.0." That makes the raw star number easy to game and hard to

trust for a brand-new or lightly-reviewed business.

So sorting a "best of" list purely by star rating floats untested businesses to

the top and buries long-established ones with thousands of happy customers. We

think that's backwards.

What we do instead

We use a Bayesian weighted rating — a well-established statistical method for

ranking things by rating when the number of ratings varies a lot (it's the same

idea behind "top rated" lists on many large review platforms).

In plain terms:

Every business starts out judged against the local average for its category

and city.

As a business earns more reviews, our ranking trusts its own rating more and

leans on that local average less.

A business needs to earn enough reviews before a high rating fully "counts."

The practical effect: a business with a strong rating and a large, consistent

review history rises to the top. A high rating from only a handful of reviews

still ranks well — but it won't leapfrog a proven business with a comparable

rating and a far deeper track record.

The formula, for the curious:

score = (v / (v + m)) × R  +  (m / (v + m)) × C

where R is the business's average rating, v is its number of reviews,

C is the average rating of all qualifying businesses in that city and

category, and m is a tuning weight set per category. Categories that

naturally attract huge review counts (like restaurants) use a higher weight than

niche categories, so the bar is fair within each field.

What "qualifying" means

To appear on a leaderboard, a business must have a genuine, active Google

presence with enough reviews to rank meaningfully. We exclude listings with too

few reviews to assess, and we rank only real, distinct businesses.

When a page shows fewer than 25 — or doesn't exist

Some city-and-category combinations simply don't have 25 strong local

businesses. Rather than pad a list with weak or irrelevant results:

If a category is thin in a given city, we **widen the search to the surrounding

area*. When we do, the page will say so — for example, "Serving the greater

[City] area."*

If there still aren't enough legitimate businesses to make a credible list, we

don't publish that page at all. A short, honest list beats a padded one.

Freshness

Each leaderboard is a point-in-time snapshot. The ratings and review counts on

a page are the ones we captured from Google when that page was built, and they do

not change between builds. Every page displays its capture date, so you can always

see how current the data is. When we rebuild a page, we re-query Google and the

rankings are recalculated from the new data.

Data source and attribution

Business names, ratings, and review counts are provided by Google. Powered by

Google. Google and the Google logo are trademarks of Google LLC. Where required,

review and author attribution is displayed alongside the data.

*We are not affiliated with or endorsed by Google. Ratings reflect public Google

data at the time of each rebuild and may change.*