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 removed, or confirmed as fraudulent, are excluded entirely rather than down-weighted. A new review that automated checks flag is held for a moderator and does not count until a person approves it. A review that is already published is not excluded when it is reported, disputed, or edited in a way that needs checking: it stays visible (marked “Under review” after such an edit) and stays in the calculation while a moderator looks at it, because an unreviewed suspicion is not a finding.
How ratings appear in search results
Search engines can show a business’s Vouch Rate stars under their results. We describe each profile to them with structured data, and hold that description to stricter rules than the page itself:
- Only reviews written on Vouch Rate. Reviews imported from other platforms are never passed on, and a profile that holds any has no rating marked up at all.
- Where the weighted rating and the unweighted mean differ, we mark up whichever is lower, so a search result can never show a business better than its reviews support.
- Only profiles with at least one published review — never demonstration or suspended profiles. The individual reviews marked up are the ones on the page, as published; reviews under review are left out.
- Apaxon Limited, the company that develops Vouch Rate, has a profile like any other business, and its reviews are published under the same rules. We never mark up its rating. Search engines treat a rating as self-serving when the business rated controls the site publishing it, and we would rather not test that line with our own developer.
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.