Six principles we refuse to break.
Ranking local businesses at scale is an exercise in restraint. These are the guardrails we commit to publicly.
No paid placement
Rank is determined by the model. No promoted listings, no sponsored slots, no ad inventory in any leaderboard.
Same rules for everyone
Claimed businesses on paid plans rank with the same formula as unclaimed businesses.
Full methodology is public
Weights, inputs, and source boundaries are documented publicly and versioned.
Nightly refresh, never stale
Every business gets rescored nightly, so rank can move within 24 hours of meaningful signal change.
Businesses can see their own score
Claimed profiles can inspect component-level score detail without a paid requirement.
Appeal is a real process
Scoring disputes are reviewable by a human and corrections are tracked through transparency reporting.
Health score.
A 0-100 composite telling you whether a local business is winning or losing in its market, refreshed nightly.
The six components
Reviews (25%)
Composite of rating quality, review volume against category baseline, 90-day velocity trend, and recency decay.
Market Rank (20%)
Normalized percentile rank inside each city + category market.
Financial Health (20%)
Estimated from category/geography revenue bands, tenure, digital footprint, and operating signals. This is an estimate, not disclosed revenue.
Response Rate (15%)
Share of trailing reviews that received an owner response, weighted by latency and response quality characteristics.
Jobs Flow (10%)
Completed work velocity and reliability where first-party data exists; otherwise a category baseline is applied.
Operator activity (10%)
Captures adoption depth for active Operator workflows. Non-users receive a neutral category baseline.
How we compute market rank.
Each market is a city + primary category tuple. Rank sorts by market-share signal, with Health score and tenure as tie-breakers.
A normalized estimate of local demand share based on review depth, rating quality, velocity, and response performance.
market_rank- integer position from 1 to market_total.market_total- total competitors in this city + category.market_share_score- normalized 0.00 to 1.00 estimate.
AI Visibility score.
A 0-100 signal for how findable a business is across AI answer surfaces.
Inputs to AI Visibility
Citation frequency is measured from representative local intent query sets and tracked on rolling windows.
Data sources.
Operator combines licensed/open substrate data, structured enrichment, and owner-verified corrections.
Base layer for business existence, location, and category. Licensed under CDLA Permissive 2.0.
Ratings, review counts, and profile metadata via official APIs under provider terms.
Address normalization, tenure signals, and licensing context where publicly available.
Structured extraction of business-owned domains, respecting robots.txt posture.
Model-assisted extraction to normalize service, pricing, and content quality signals.
Claimed businesses can correct key profile fields; owner edits supersede inferred values.
Freshness.
Everything in Operator updates on one of four cadences:
Health score, market rank, and AI Visibility scores recompute nightly.
Site enrichment and model-assisted extraction refresh on a weekly cycle.
Base map and directory substrate synchronize with upstream source updates.
Owner profile changes apply immediately; composite score updates on the next nightly pass.
What we do not score.
- Actual revenue. Financial signals are modeled estimates.
- True craft quality. Reviews are a proxy, not absolute truth.
- Ethical fit. Compliance and trust indicators are surfaced separately.
- Personal fit. Rank is a filter, not a final buying decision.
Methodology FAQ.
How often does Operator update business rankings?
Every night at 2am HST. Health scores, market ranks, and AI Visibility scores refresh on the same nightly cycle.
Where does Operator get its business data?
Primary source is Overture Maps Foundation, enriched with official metadata APIs and first-party crawl/extraction. Claimed businesses can override key fields with verified edits.
What is the Health score?
A 0-100 composite from six weighted components: Reviews (25%), Market Rank (20%), Financial Health (20%), Response Rate (15%), Jobs Flow (10%), and Operator activity (10%).
How is market rank calculated?
Rank is computed within each city + category market using market-share signals first, then Health score and tenure as tie-breakers.
Can a business pay to rank higher?
No. There is no sponsored placement and no paid rank boost.
What is the AI Visibility score?
A 0-100 measure of how findable a business is in AI answer surfaces, based on structured data, citations, crawlability, and content quality signals.