How shop results are ordered
The default order — “Best match” — is a score out of 100 built from four measurements we already take. Every one of them is something we can show the shop owner. None of them is self-declared by the shop, and none of them is purchasable.
Placement is never for sale
There is no paid tier in this directory, no sponsored slot, and no bid. If that ever changes, paid placement will be labelled on the listing itself and named on this page before it ships. Business size is not an input either — a solo technician and a twelve-branch chain are scored identically.
The blend
| Factor | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Trust score | 45 | The shop’s computed trust score — verification, active certifications, completed repairs and profile completeness. If we have no data: A shop with no computed trust score is not ranked at all; it is listed after the ranked shops. |
| Customer rating | 30 | The mean of every approved review. Reviews require a completed ticket, so this cannot be padded with reviews from people who were never customers. If we have no data: A shop with no approved reviews is not ranked at all; it is listed after the ranked shops. |
| Accountability | 15 | Dispute rate, time to resolve, refund rate and warranty honour, refreshed nightly. If we have no data: Contributes nothing. A shop with too little history to score earns 0 from this factor, never a penalty. |
| Measured response time | 10 | The measured median time this shop takes to answer a quote request. Full marks under one hour. If we have no data: Contributes nothing. A shop that has not answered a request yet earns 0 from this factor. |
| Total | 100 | The maximum a shop can score. |
Shops we have not measured yet
A shop with no approved reviews, or with no computed trust score, is not scored at all. It is listed after every scored shop, in alphabetical order, and its card says so. We do not give it a zero and mix it in among shops we have measured — that would read as a bad shop rather than a new one.
How deep the ranking runs
Results are ranked across the whole set your filters matched, up to 500 shops. Past that the order would no longer be a global ranking, so paging stops rather than continuing into an arbitrary tail you would reasonably read as “worse shops”.
The other sort options
Name and Nearest are exact orders over your whole result set. Rating and Trust re-order the page you are looking at only — their labels say “(this page)” for that reason. Only “Best match” is a global ranking.
Verification comes first
A shop that has not completed business verification is shown as a name-and-area stub rather than a full listing, whatever its other numbers would be. That is a visibility rule, not a ranking factor. Payment setup is not either way: whether a shop has finished Stripe onboarding changes whether you can book online, never whether it appears.