Paid placement vs published ranking criteria

This page is about mechanism, not about anybody in particular. When a list of contractors is ordered by who paid for the position, the order carries exactly one piece of information: who was willing and able to pay. That is a real fact about a business, and it is not the fact you were looking for. When a list is ordered by criteria published in advance and computed from state records, the order carries whatever those criteria measure - no more, and no less.

What ordering by payment does to a list

It compresses the signal to one variable. Position one and position eight differ by budget. Everything else you might have wanted to compare has been flattened out of the ordering.
It moves. A bid-based order can be different tomorrow with no change in any company's credential, insurance or record.
It correlates with size, not quality. The companies that can sustain a per-click or per-position cost are the ones with a marketing budget, which is a fact about a marketing budget.
It is not, by itself, dishonest. Paid placement disclosed as paid placement is an advertisement, and advertisements are allowed to exist. The problem is only ever an order that looks like a judgment and is not one.

What our order is computed from

The rule, stated on the methodology page: businesses cannot pay to be listed, and payment never affects rankings. The order comes from fields the state itself publishes, and it changes by state because what the states publish changes by state. Four real examples, all documented there in full:

Texas plumbing

A current TSBPE license is required to appear at all. Ranked by (1) a valid insurance certificate on file with the state, then (2) longest time licensed, by original license date. No other factor affects order.

Washington plumbing

An active L&I plumbing contractor license is required to appear at all. Ranked by (1) insurance policy on file with L&I, then (2) larger contractor bond, then (3) company name. Washington publishes no original licensure date, so time licensed is not used there - we rank only on what the state actually publishes.

Virginia pest control

Every license in the Virginia pest file shares one statewide expiry date, and there is no insurance or bond figure, so there is genuinely nothing to rank on. Rather than invent an order that looks like merit, those pages are sorted alphabetically and say so.

Minnesota plumbing

A 2012 system migration at DLI stamped 30% of current plumbing contractors with a single date, so we do not know how long those companies have been licensed. Ranking the rest by date and putting those last would push the longest-established firms to the bottom while claiming to rank by years licensed. So those pages are alphabetical, and the page says so.

The pattern is the same in all four: the ranking is a function of published agency data, and where the data cannot support an order, we refuse to manufacture one. That refusal is the part that a paid order never has to make.

The test to apply to any directory, including this one: can you read the ranking rule before you read the ranking, and does it name the fields it uses? If it does, you can check it. If it does not, the order is telling you something you cannot verify.

Then how does this site make money?

We earn a fee when you call businesses through numbers on this site. This never affects who is listed or how they rank.

Being plain about the shape of that: money does change hands, it is a material connection, and it is disclosed next to the call button rather than buried here. What it does not touch is who appears and in what order, because the inputs to both are agency records. To move a listing up a page, you would have to change a state license file - which is not something anyone can buy from us, and is the entire point of building the ranking out of records we do not control.

There is one thing on the site that is not a listing and is always labelled as such: a referral line, including the emergency line where one is offered, connects you with an available contractor from our call network. That contractor is a referral, marked as one, and is not one of the license-verified listings unless you picked them from the list yourself.

What we do not claim

A ranking built on credentials is not a ranking on workmanship. A license means the state authorized that kind of work; it is not proof the work will be good.
Position one is not a recommendation. It is the top of a published sort, and the sort rule is printed on the page.
Absence is not a verdict. Plenty of licensed companies are not listed here, because we only publish a city and trade where enough companies pass verification to make a real list.