CityvettedWhat the Vetted Score actually measures (and what it ignores)
The six factors behind every ranking, weighted and explained, plus the things we deliberately leave out.
People ask us a version of the same question almost every week: is the Vetted Score just an average of a business's star rating? It is not. A four-star average can hide a company that was excellent for years and fell apart last spring, and a 4.6 average can belong to a shop with eleven reviews, half of them from the owner's cousins. The Vetted Score exists because a raw star average answers the wrong question. We do not want to know how a business has felt to everyone who ever hired it. We want to know how it is likely to treat you, next month, when your water heater fails at 6 a.m.
So the score is built from review data, but it weights and filters that data instead of swallowing it whole. Here is what actually goes in, and just as important, what we leave out on purpose.
- The Vetted Score is not a star average. It is a weighted read of review volume, recency, consistency, and how a business responds when things go wrong.
- We ignore review text we cannot verify came from a real customer, and we discount sudden bursts that look coordinated.
- The score cannot measure price, and it does not try to. It measures reliability.
What the score counts
Four signals do most of the work. The first is volume, because ten reviews and four hundred reviews are not the same evidence even at the same average. The second is recency, which gets its own article because it matters more than most people expect. The third is consistency: a business that holds a 4.5 for three straight years tells us more than one that swings between 3.1 and 4.9 by season. The fourth, and the one readers rarely guess, is how a business handles a bad review. A calm, specific reply that fixes the problem moves our score. A defensive rant moves it the other way.
Cityvetted methodology, 2026.
What the score ignores, and why
This is the part we are proudest of. We throw a lot away. We ignore reviews with no text when they arrive in a cluster, because a wave of five-star ratings with nothing written is the oldest trick in the local-business book. We ignore one-star reviews that are clearly about a different company or a billing dispute with a third party. And we ignore price entirely.
That last one surprises people. Should the cheapest plumber not score higher? No, because cheap and reliable are different axes, and pretending they are the same does you a disservice. A score that punished higher prices would quietly push you toward whoever underbids, which is often whoever cuts corners. We tell you who shows up and does the work. You decide what that is worth.
"A star average tells you how a business has been. We are trying to tell you how it is going to be."
to Maya Hendricks, Home Services EditorWhat it cannot do
The Vetted Score is not a guarantee, and I want to be plain about its limits. It cannot see a contractor who is great at roofing and sloppy at gutters, because review platforms rarely separate the two. It cannot know that the foreman who earned those reviews quit in March. It leans on public data, and public data has gaps. When the data is too thin to say anything honest, we say so instead of inventing a number, which is the whole subject of another piece in this series.
What the score does well is narrow your shortlist from forty names to five, and tell you which of those five has earned trust recently, repeatedly, and from people who sound real. After that, the last mile is yours: a phone call, a written estimate, a question about the warranty. We are a starting point built to be honest about being a starting point.
We revisit the scoring weights twice a year and publish what changed. If a business ever tells you it can raise its Vetted Score by paying us, it is lying, and I would genuinely like to hear about it.