How this list works

A rating on its own does not say much. If two people have reviewed a business and both were happy, it shows five stars — the same five stars as a business that has kept two hundred people happy. The second one has been tested and the first one has not.

So we work out how far each rating could realistically slip once more people have had their say. A perfect score from a handful of reviews has a lot of room to fall; a high score from hundreds has very little. That is a fairer read than the star number alone.

Businesses whose figures are too close to separate are put in the same group, and inside a group the order is drawn at random. It is redrawn every time the page is updated, so the same business does not sit at the top forever.

That is deliberate. Once the numbers cannot tell two businesses apart, putting one above the other would be a coin toss presented as a verdict — and it would hand one of them every phone call for a reason they never earned. A tie is shown as a tie.

No. There is no way to buy a place on this list or a better position in it. The order comes from the review figures and the draw described above, and money is not one of the inputs.

If a sponsored listing ever appears here it will sit outside the list, labelled, and it will not change the order of anything in it. Anything else would make the list worth less than nothing.

Yes. The buttons at the top of each page reorder by review count, by rating, or alphabetically. Nothing is hidden in any of them — it is the same businesses in a different order.

Businesses are found through their public Google Business Profile in the area each page covers. A business needs a rating of at least 4.5 from at least five reviews to appear. Shops and suppliers are left out — this is a list of people you can call to do a job.

From the coordinates Google holds for the business, not from reading its address. That matters for the many trades who work from a van and publish no street address at all: guessing would put them wherever we happened to be looking.

They are a snapshot, taken on the date shown at the top of each page, and they drift after that. The business’s own Google listing is always the current figure.

No. We have not inspected anyone’s work, checked their licence, confirmed their insurance, or spoken to their customers. What is shown is a rating and a review count that were public on Google. Check licensing and insurance yourself and get the price in writing — the same as you would with a name passed over a fence.

Claim your listing from the button on your card, or email us. Add your logo, photos of your work, the services you offer, your hours — or fix a wrong number. It is free and it does not move you up the list.

Ask, and you are off. No account, no explanation needed, and nothing is wanted from you in return. Removal means removed: your details are deleted and the number is remembered only so a later update cannot put you back.

Your public Google Business Profile. Nothing was bought and you were never asked for it, because none of it came from you. There is more on that on the privacy page.