RankRackHow RankRack works
A review site asking people to trust its numbers owes them an explanation of how those numbers are produced. This page is that explanation. Nothing here is proprietary.
What this runs on
Transparency
Anyone can see a provider ratings, their review history, which providers are on the platform, who we run on ourselves, and a provider verification status. No hidden sponsorships, and nothing that quietly changes a score behind the scenes.
Independence
A provider cannot buy a better rating, full stop. Claiming a page is free, and the paid tiers unlock analytics, business tools, and customization, nothing more. The reviews stay independent of what anyone pays us.
Community driven
The people using these services decide who is trustworthy, not us. Verified reviews, from someone we can confirm actually bought the service, carry more weight than anonymous ones.
How a star rating is worked out
Reviews are weighted by how confident we are that they are real. A five star review from someone whose purchase we could confirm counts for twice as much as an anonymous one. The average you see on a provider page is that weighted average, and the review count sits next to it every time, because a 4.6 from twelve people and a 4.6 from twelve thousand are not the same claim.
| Tier | Weight | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Verified purchase | 1.00 | Confirmed through a supported integration or solid evidence that the reviewer bought the service. This is the top tier and carries the most weight. |
| Manually verified | 0.75 | An invoice or order number uploaded by the reviewer and checked by us. |
| Unverified | 0.50 | No proof of purchase supplied. Still allowed, because people should be able to speak, but weighted lower than the two above. |
The Trust Score is a different number
The star rating is what customers think. The Trust Score, out of 100, is how the provider conducts itself. Keeping the two apart stops a company with great reviews but poor conduct from hiding behind the stars, and it stops a company that handles problems well from being written off over a rough patch. Every provider page shows the working.
| Component | Points | Measured from |
|---|---|---|
| Review authenticity | 30 | The share of reviews backed by a verified purchase or a checked invoice. |
| Answers criticism | 25 | The share of reviews at three stars or lower that got a public reply. |
| Reply speed | 15 | The median time to reply publicly, banded at 24 hours, 3 days, and 7 days. |
| Complaints resolved | 20 | The share of complaints that ended with the reviewer confirming it was sorted. |
| History stability | 10 | How steady the rolling average has been rather than swinging month to month. |
Appeals
A provider can appeal a review they believe breaks the guidelines, and the outcome is one of three: removed, edited, or left as it stands. While an appeal is open the review stays published and is tagged as under appeal, so nothing disappears quietly while it is being argued about. Every decision is recorded with the reason it was raised, what was decided, who decided it and when.
Why paying cannot move a score
Claiming a page is free, and providers can pay for tiers above that. Those buy analytics, API access, and team access. What they do not buy is any influence over a score: the functions that produce a star rating and a Trust Score take reviews and conduct records as their input, and are never handed subscription, plan, or billing information. Which providers are on the platform is listed on the transparency page.
How the front page picks providers
The providers on the front page are not the highest lifetime averages on the site. They are ranked on the last 3 months only, so the slot reflects how a company is doing now rather than how it did two years ago. A provider that has gone quiet drops out of it, and one that has never been listed before can reach it in its first season by asking its own customers for reviews.
At most 5 reviews from any one day count toward that ranking, and which ones is decided by hashing the review id rather than by their rating. A provider that lands forty reviews in an afternoon gets 5 of them counted, the same as a provider that had a steady week, so a burst cannot bury what came before it and there is no order a company can submit in to choose which of its reviews are used.
Imported reviews are aged by the date they were originally written, not the day we brought them across. A back catalogue therefore ages out of the 3 month window like anything else, and importing a history cannot take the front page.
How this shows up in search and AI answers
Review sites feed search results and the models people now ask for recommendations, and it is fair to want to know what we hand them. Provider pages carry structured data holding two figures: the star rating and the number of reviews behind it. That is what can produce stars against a result, and what anything reading the page is most likely to take.
Imported reviews are counted in both of those. A provider that brings a history across from another platform has a larger review count and a rating drawn from it, and that does carry into search. We take reviews first published within the last 3 years, all of them or none, so a company cannot bring over its good ones and leave the rest, but the effect on search is real and worth stating plainly rather than leaving somebody to find.
What is not handed over: individual reviews carry no structured data of their own, so no single review is presented to a search engine as a standalone result. The Trust Score is not in that markup either, and it is calculated from reviews written here, so an import moves neither it, the per-service ratings, nor what a page is commonly praised or criticised for.
Who runs it
Built by Kade Terpstra and Bradley Pincott, and run by RankRack Ltd, registered in England and Wales under company number 17378395. RankRack is not a division of anything, so there is no parent company whose other interests could pull on what gets published here. Knowing who is behind a review site matters as much as knowing who funds it, and there is no editorial board to hide behind either: if a decision on this site was wrong, it was ours. Where either of us has a connection to a company listed here, it is declared on the transparency page.
Kade Terpstra owns and runs a separate business under Wrenchy Productions. It does not sell any of the services this platform reviews, so it will never appear on RankRack and has no stake in it.