What is the Evidence Score, and why is it separate from the rating?

Every Vouch Rate profile shows two numbers side by side: a star rating and an Evidence Score.

They answer different questions. The rating tells you what customers said. The Evidence Score tells you how far you can rely on it. We keep them separate because combining them into one figure would hide the more useful of the two.

Why one number isn't enough

Imagine two businesses, both rated 4.8:

• Business A has twelve reviews. None are verified, and most arrived in the same week.
• Business B has three hundred reviews built up over five years, most of them confirmed through its sales system.

The ratings are identical. The evidence behind them is not. A single score that blended the two would either flatter Business A or hide what makes Business B's rating dependable.

The Evidence Score measures how well evidenced a rating is, not whether a business is good. A business with a poor rating can have an excellent Evidence Score. The evidence is strong; it just says something unflattering.

What goes into the Evidence Score

The score is out of 100, made up of six parts:

• Verified experiences (up to 35): what share of reviews are tied to a real dealing. Experiences confirmed by a connected sales system count for more than ones the business simply told us about.
• Review authenticity (up to 25): the average authenticity score our fraud checks gave the profile's reviews. We publish the types of signal we look for; we don't publish their weights, so they can't be gamed.
• Pattern integrity (up to 15): reduced by confirmed fake reviews, by reviews arriving in a spike rather than a steady stream, and by disputes the business raised that moderators rejected.
• Business identity (up to 10): whether the business has proved it controls the website or company it claims to be.
• Accountability (up to 10): how often the business replies publicly. This measures engagement, not agreement. A robust reply to a critical review earns exactly as much as a gracious one.
• Track record (up to 5): how long and how steadily reviews have built up. A long history is harder to fake than a short one.

The bands

Rather than asking you to interpret a number, each profile shows a band:

• Exceptional evidence: almost every review is tied to a transaction we confirmed independently.
• Strong evidence: most reviews are tied to a confirmed customer relationship.
• Reasonable evidence: a meaningful share of reviews are verified, but many are not.
• Limited evidence: few reviews are tied to a confirmed transaction. Read them with that in mind.
• Not enough evidence yet: shown when a profile has fewer than three reviews, because there's too little to say either way.

What can't change it

• Paying us. No subscription plan moves the Evidence Score.
• Advertising with us.
• Asking. There's no appeal against an Evidence Score itself, only against the moderation decisions that feed into it.
• Having a high rating. That's the whole point of keeping it separate.

How businesses raise it

The only way to raise an Evidence Score is to give it more evidence:

• connect a sales or booking system, so customers' experiences can be confirmed directly;
• invite every eligible customer to review, not only the ones expected to be happy;
• prove control of the business's website or company;
• reply to reviews, including the critical ones.

None of these change what customers say. They change how confidently a reader can rely on it.

Using the two numbers together

• High rating, strong evidence: customers are happy, and you can rely on it.
• High rating, limited evidence: it may well be accurate, but read the reviews themselves, check when they arrived, and look for specific detail. Our guide to spotting a fake review helps.
• Low rating, strong evidence: the complaints are well founded. Read what they're about before deciding whether they matter to you.
• Not enough evidence yet: a new or quiet profile. Neither number means much yet.

For how the star rating itself is calculated, see why two 5-star reviews don't make a 5.0. The full Evidence Score method is on our Evidence Score page.