How the audit works · How They Book

What the audit reads

Each audit is an automated crawl of the business's public website. Every profile shows the date of that crawl and how many pages it read. The crawl reads up to 20 pages per website, choosing the ones a customer is most likely to use: the home page, contact, services, booking, pricing, about and similar pages.

We do not contact the business, fill in its forms or call its numbers. Nothing is checked against licensing boards, insurers, review sites or any other outside source. A profile describes what the website publishes on the crawl date. It is not an assessment of the work the business does.

Found, not found and not determined

Every check ends in one of three results.

Found The website publishes it. A partly met check, such as a warranty with no stated period, earns part of its points.
Not found The crawl looked and did not detect it on the pages it read. That does not mean the business does not offer it, only that a customer reading those pages would not find it.
Not determined We could not tell either way: the information may sit in a widget or image the crawl cannot read, or our evidence did not hold up.

A check that is not determined scores zero, the same as one not found, because the score only counts what we could show. But it is never reported as a No. The profile says it could not be determined, and why.

Every finding carries its evidence

Every found result shows the words we read and a link to the page they came from. Before a result is recorded, those words are checked against the stored text of that page. If they are not there, the result is reported as not determined rather than as a finding. A heading or a menu label on its own is never evidence.

These rows record what the website states. The audit does not confirm whether a published claim, such as a licence number or a guarantee, is accurate.

About the quotes

Quotes are reproduced from the crawl's text extraction, which does not preserve some punctuation. A quote may be missing an apostrophe or a dash, so "we're" can appear as "were". We show the words exactly as they were extracted and never repair them, because a repair would be a guess.

The 100-point score

Every business in every industry is scored on the same fixed scale of 100 points, split across four categories. The scale never stretches or shrinks to fit the businesses audited, so a score can be compared with other businesses in the same industry, and with the same business's own earlier audits.

We never compare across industries. What a customer expects from a roofer's website is not what they expect from a dentist's, so a roofer is only ever compared with other roofers.

Category	Points	Checks
Contactability	25	7
Booking	25	6
Information	25	7
Trust	25	6

Industry	Median score	Highest score achieved
Roofing	50.5 / 100	75 / 100
Plumbing	52 / 100	80 / 100

Both figures come from the compared businesses in each industry, described below. A score well below 100 is normal today: no business yet publishes everything the checks look for.

Checks that differ by industry

Most checks are the same in every industry. Where a check does not fit an industry, such as a warranty for a chiropractor, that industry is checked for something its customers look for instead, worth the same points in the same category. Every industry still has 100 points across the same four categories.

Trades	Chiropractic and physical therapy	Law firms
Emergency contact visible	Directions and parking	Directions and parking
Estimate request	Appointment request	Consultation request
Service areas	New patient information	Same
Emergency cover explained	Conditions treated	Practice areas
Financing	Insurance accepted	Fee arrangements
Warranty	Cancellation policy	Languages spoken
Project gallery	Practitioner education	Practitioner education
Guarantees	Years in practice	Case results

Some profiles list points no business in the industry has earned yet. Those points are available to any business that publishes what the check looks for. None has done so yet, which describes websites in that industry today, not a limit of the scale.

Who each business is compared with

Each industry page reports three numbers, each a subset of the one before.

Audited: every business whose website we crawled and checked.
Published: the audits complete enough to publish. A website the crawl could not reach, or an audit where too many checks could not be determined or too few customer tasks could be worked out, gets no page at all rather than a page with gaps.
Compared: published businesses whose latest audit is from the last 90 days. Only these are ranked and used for medians.

Industry	Audited	Published	Compared
Roofing	122	108	91
Plumbing	84	77	75
Chiropractic and PT	30	26	26

A comparison needs at least 75 compared businesses in an industry. Below that, a percentile is too easily moved by one or two websites, so no comparison is shown at all.

If a published business's latest audit could not be completed in full, its page keeps showing the previous audit and it is left out of comparisons until the next one. One incomplete audit never takes a page down on its own.

The 90-day comparison window

Websites change. A ranking that set an audit from months ago against audits from last week would be unfair to both: the older site may have improved since, and the newer ones would be measured against a picture that no longer exists. So a business is only compared with others when its latest audit is less than 90 days old.

An older audit keeps its full profile, with every check and its evidence. It is simply not ranked, and its page says a refreshed audit is due. An unranked profile is waiting for a new crawl. It is not being penalised.

Where each result comes from

Most results come from our own crawl. Some come from the shared business directory this site is part of, which checked the same website earlier. Those rows say so and show the date of the directory's check.

Verified by the directory The directory confirmed it.
Derived by the directory The directory worked it out from other records it holds.
Stated by the business What the business says about itself, recorded as stated and not verified by anyone.

When our crawl finds something, our finding replaces the directory's older record. When our crawl does not find something the directory recorded, the directory's record is kept only if it came from a page our crawl did not read, and the row says that page was not checked again.

Robots and crawling

The crawl reads public pages only, the same pages any visitor can open, and does not log in or submit forms. A website we could not read gets no profile: if its home page did not load, or no page could be captured, there is nothing to audit.

A website can also ask crawlers to stay away through a file called robots.txt. We have not yet confirmed whether the crawler that collects these pages honours that file. Until we have, every audit records the question as unanswered rather than claiming the request was respected. If you would rather your website were not audited, ask for its removal.

Changes to the method

The checks are refined as we learn where they misread websites. Every change gets a new version number, and every profile records the version it was scored under. If a score changed and the website did not, the table shows whether a change to the method could be the reason.

Version	From	What changed	Could scores move?
1.7	22 October 2026	Each industry is now audited on checks that fit it. Chiropractic and physical therapy practices, and law firms, are checked for what their customers look for, such as the insurance accepted, the conditions treated, the practice areas and how fees are charged, in place of trade items like estimates, warranties, financing and project galleries. Every industry still has 26 scored checks worth 100 points, and a business is only ever compared with others in its own industry. The checks for roofing and plumbing did not change, so no existing score moves.	No
1.6	22 October 2026	Lists from the shared business directory that are mostly copies of the website's own menu are no longer counted as services. A business's own name never counts as a service, a team member or a town served. Directory records now have to meet the same standard as our own findings: a licence needs a number or the body that issued it, a warranty needs a stated period, and a price needs a figure. Four directory fields that did not describe the check they answered were removed. Comparisons now include only published audits from the last 90 days; that changes rankings and medians, not scores.	Yes
1.5	22 October 2026	Our own crawl now outranks the directory's unconfirmed records: only a record the directory has verified stands without our crawl checking it. Directory values that say something is absent, or that are only menu labels, are ignored. A heading or menu label on its own is never evidence. A team page needs a person's name together with their role. Five directory fields that did not describe the check they answered were removed, so guarantees, for example, are now judged from the website only.	Yes
1.4	21 October 2026	Stricter evidence for pricing, financing, licences, certifications, guarantees and emergency contact: each now needs the specific thing named, such as a price figure, a financing partner or a licence number. A guarantee that does not say what it covers earns part of its points. A certification and a licence can no longer be found on the same sentence. The project gallery is now detected from the page itself: a gallery page or heading with at least three photos.	Yes
1.3	21 October 2026	A warranty that states what it covers but no period earns part of its points instead of none. Pages that have not changed since the last audit keep their earlier answers instead of being read again, and a score change under 5 points caused by a single check is treated as noise rather than reported as a change.	Yes
1.2	13 October 2026	Every result read from page text must now quote the specific sentence it rests on, or it is not counted. Comparisons are shown only once enough businesses have been audited for the figure to be meaningful.	Yes
1.1	8 October 2026	The first published method: 26 scored checks in four categories on a 100-point scale. Each check names where its answer may come from, the shared business directory or our own crawl of the website.	No

Requesting a correction

If a result is wrong, for example a check marked not found when the page shows it, or a quote taken from the wrong page, request a correction. Tell us the page and the check, and what the website shows.