How listings are ranked

The six checks

Check	Points
State licence verifiedMatched against the state's own roster, by name and number	30
Review recordCount and star distribution, with the date we read it	25
Services evidencedNamed on the company's own site or listing, quoted and linked	20
Profile maintainedThe business claims and updates its own listing	10
Hours publishedA usable weekly schedule, not a single day	10
Contact completePhone and a street address on record	5

What the score is not

It is not a rating of workmanship. It counts records, and a record cannot tell you whether a crew turned up on time. A low score usually means a company keeps little public information, which is a different thing from doing bad work, and every page says which of the six checks came up short rather than hiding the deduction in a total.

Paid placement

Sponsored slots sit above the ranked list, never inside it, and are labelled as sponsored. The organic order is the verification score and nothing else. A company cannot buy a point, and information a company tells us about itself does not earn one either. Only a record we can read ourselves does.

Claiming

Claiming a listing is free, involves no sales call, and does not change the score. It exists so the business can correct what is wrong.