How the Evidence Score works

The Evidence Score measures how much of what a buyer needs to know about a restoration company is documented and checkable. It isn't a quality rating. A high score means the company tells you a lot and we could confirm it. A low score can belong to a good company with a thin website.

Where the evidence comes from

The company's own website. We crawl the public pages of the site on record, respect its robots.txt and pause between requests. We keep the exact words behind every item we record. Services, emergency hours, insurance work, process, response time, pricing approach, warranty and the standards a company names all come from here. They're labelled self-reported, because a website can say anything.

Public records. A business registration and its formation date come from the state's business registry. We check a registry automatically only where the state publishes it in a form its terms let us use: open data in Texas, Connecticut, Colorado, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Virginia and the District of Columbia, a free bulk file in Florida, and a public search in Idaho, Kentucky and Mississippi. We match on the exact business name and the same city, and log nothing when the match isn't clean. Elsewhere these items stay unchecked until someone looks them up by hand and logs the result.

Some of that data carries a license that asks for credit. Iowa's business entity file comes from the Iowa Secretary of State through the Iowa Data Hub, and the District's corporate registrations come from the DC Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection through Open Data DC. Both are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Credential records. An IICRC Certified Firm listing, an EPA Lead-Safe Certified Firm record and a state contractor or remediation license count only when we find the record on the issuing body's own lookup. A company saying "IICRC certified" on its website earns the smaller, self-reported item for naming an industry standard, not the credential. State licenses are checked automatically where the licensing board publishes its records for reuse: the Contractors State License Board in California, the Department of Business and Professional Regulation in Florida, the Department of Labor's mold remediation licenses in New York, Labor & Industries in Washington, the Construction Contractors Board in Oregon and the Department of Consumer Protection in Connecticut. Only an active, unexpired license under the company's own business name counts, and a miss is recorded as no matching record, not as a mark against the company. A license held in the owner's personal name won't match. IICRC and EPA Lead-Safe records have no source we're allowed to query automatically, so those stay manual and show as not verified until someone logs the lookup.

A mail check. Where a company publishes an email address, we check that its domain accepts mail.

Coverage and the ranking bar

Coverage is the share of the 100 points we could check, whether the answer was yes or no. A company's own website can supply at most 67 points of coverage, and the mail check 2 more. That's deliberate: ranking needs at least one record from outside the company, so a company is ranked only at 70% coverage or more.

A state or city list is ranked only when at least 8 companies meet the listing bar and at least 8 of them reach that coverage. Otherwise the page shows an unranked comparison table in alphabetical order. We never lower the bar to make a ranking.

The listing bar

To be listed, a company needs an explicit restoration service on its own website, a US identity, a working way to reach it, a town we can read and two independent kinds of source. A company that falls short keeps a page that says which item was missing.

Franchise locations

A franchise location, such as a SERVPRO or a True North office, is listed and scored like any other company. Each one is marked with its network's name. Its website is mostly the network's shared template, so its page is kept out of search results: location pages built from one template read as copies of each other.

What we leave out

We don't use or show star ratings, review counts, Better Business Bureau grades or badges from lead-generation sites. We don't sell placement, and a company can't pay to change its score. Where we know a company's Google profile, we link to it and show nothing from it.

The weights below are fixed. A missing item scores zero, and its points never move to another item.