How the rating is calculated
A plain average is easy to manipulate and often misleading: two enthusiastic reviews from four years ago should not outrank nine hundred from this year. So each review carries a weight, and profiles with little evidence are pulled toward the platform average until they have enough of it.
Every profile also shows its unweighted mean next to the headline figure, so you can always see what the raw arithmetic says.
The formula
weight(review) = verification × recency × authenticity
rating = ( Σ stars×weight + 3.7 × 8 )
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( Σ weight + 8 )Verification weight
A verified experience counts for more — but never so much that unverified criticism is drowned out. The gap between the top and bottom of this table is deliberately narrow.
| Verification level | Weight |
|---|---|
| unverified | 0.60 |
| email verified | 0.80 |
| transaction verified | 1.00 |
| purchase verified | 1.15 |
| identity verified | 1.20 |
| platform verified | 1.25 |
Recency
A review's weight halves every 18 months, with a floor of 0.35. Old reviews fade in influence but never disappear, and they stay on the profile in full. Each profile also publishes its 12-month and 30-day averages separately, because a business that has genuinely improved deserves to be seen improving.
The prior
Ratings are shrunk toward 3.7 with a strength equivalent to 8 reviews. A profile with two perfect reviews therefore does not display 5.0 — it displays what the evidence actually supports. The effect becomes negligible past roughly forty reviews.
What is excluded
Reviews a moderator has confirmed as fraudulent are excluded entirely rather than down-weighted. Reviews merely flagged by automated checks are not excluded — they stay in the calculation at reduced weight while a person looks at them, because an unreviewed suspicion is not a finding.
What never affects a rating
- The business's subscription tier or spend.
- Whether the business has replied, disputed, or complained about a review.
- Anything a business asks us to do.
If any constant on this page changes, the change is dated here and applied to all profiles at once.