How we score
“What we could verify” is meant to answer one question: how much of what you are reading can be checked? It is editorial, and it is published here in full so you can disagree with it.
What decides the order you see today
The score below is not live yet, but listings still are not shown alphabetically or at random. The default order runs on completeness: a listing with a real photo and a written description appears first, then one with a description and no photo yet, then a state-record-only page. Within that top tier, listings are spread across cities rather than clustered in whichever one happened to get photographed first.
The written description is never something a facility has to produce — we draft it from the state record and a person approves it before it publishes, the same as every listing here. Photos are the one piece we cannot draft ourselves; a facility that sends us some moves into this top tier, for free, and it is never for sale. Searching by city, category or name overrides this entirely; it is only the default view, not a ranking signal layered under every result.
No listing has a score yet
None of our 245 published listings has been scored, so anywhere a score would appear you will instead see a plain list of what we could actually check — license status, whether the record is linked, whether the operator has claimed it, and so on. The method below is what we intend to use for the score itself, published in advance rather than reverse-engineered afterwards.
Until then, judge a listing on what it actually shows you: the state license record we link, whether the operator has claimed and corrected it, and what the reviews say.
What goes into it
- 1
License and inspection standing
Whether the state license is current, and what the inspection and complaint history on the public record looks like. This is the only component drawn entirely from a source outside our control, and it carries the most weight.
- 2
Review quality and recency
Not just an average. A strong rating from four years ago tells you less than a moderate one from last month, and a handful of reviews tells you less than a hundred.
- 3
Verification status
Whether someone connected to the business has claimed the listing and confirmed its details. This measures whether the information is maintained, not whether the care is good.
- 4
Responsiveness
Whether the business answers families who reach out through this site, and how quickly. A home that never responds is a worse outcome for a family than one that says it is full.
- 5
Years operating
Time under the current license. Longevity is weak evidence on its own, so it counts for the least of the five.
What can never affect it
Money. Paying for a Featured placement does not raise this score, and it does not change the order of search results, category pages or comparisons. The sponsored slot and the ranking are separate paths in the code specifically so that this stays checkable rather than being a promise you have to take on faith.
Hiring the company behind this directory does not affect it either. Nor does declining to.
What a score is not
It is not an assessment of care. We do not inspect facilities or observe how residents are treated, and no score here should be read as us saying a home is good or bad. It measures how much of a listing is verifiable — which is a useful thing to know, and a different thing entirely.
A low score most often means we simply do not hold much about a business yet.
More on our sources on the trust and data page, and on how reviews are handled in the review policy.