Our Methodology

Most people have had this experience: you search for a plumber online, find someone with 4.8 stars, hire them — and get terrible work. The reviews were fake. Or they were real, but posted by a handful of thrilled customers while dozens of unhappy ones never bothered to write anything.

Online reviews, as they exist today, are broken. Ranky is built on a fundamentally different approach.

We collect every review ourselves

On most platforms, reviews are self-reported. Customers choose whether to leave feedback, what to say, and when to say it. This creates two well-known problems.

The first is selection bias. People who leave reviews tend to be either delighted or furious. The vast majority — customers with a perfectly fine, B+ experience — rarely bother. That means ratings skew toward extremes and don’t reflect reality.

The second is manipulation. When anyone can post a review, anyone can post a fake review. Competitors leave negatives. Providers recruit friends and family for positives. Entire services exist to buy ratings in bulk. On some major platforms, a significant share of reviews are estimated to be fraudulent.

Ranky eliminates both problems. We reach out to verified customers directly — they don’t come to us. Every review represents a real transaction with a real person, and no one can game the system from the outside.

Providers can’t cherry-pick their best customers

When a provider applies to Ranky, we don’t ask them for a list of their happiest customers. We require sequential job records — invoices, booking confirmations, receipts — that represent their actual recent workload.

Why does this matter? Because a provider who does great work 80% of the time but has serious problems with the other 20% shouldn’t be able to hide those bad jobs. Our process ensures the score reflects the full picture, not a highlight reel.

Reviews are conversations, not star taps

Ranky doesn’t ask customers to tap a star rating. We conduct structured quality interviews that cover four dimensions:

Quality of work — Did the provider deliver what was promised? Is the workmanship sound?

Professionalism — Were they communicative, respectful, and organized?

Timeliness — Did they show up when expected and complete the work on schedule?

Pricing fairness — Was the final cost consistent with the estimate? Were there surprises?

A conversational approach captures nuance that a star rating never could. A contractor might do beautiful tile work but consistently show up two hours late. A moving company might be punctual and polite but careless with fragile items. Our system surfaces these specifics instead of burying them in an average.

We follow up — because some problems take time to show

A fresh paint job looks great on day one. Three weeks later, it’s peeling. A plumbing repair seems solid until the first cold snap. A landscaping project reveals drainage problems after the first heavy rain.

Ranky re-contacts customers weeks after the initial review. If their assessment has changed — in either direction — the updated feedback is incorporated into the provider’s score. This catches quality issues that every other platform misses entirely.

There’s a quality floor, and we enforce it

Ranky sets a minimum quality score. Providers who fall below it are removed from the platform — regardless of how much business they bring in. There is no “too big to remove” and no amount of revenue that overrides a bad score.

Providers who are trending downward get a heads-up before removal, so they have a chance to address issues. But the threshold itself is non-negotiable. It’s what ensures that every provider on Ranky meets a real standard — not just a marketing claim.

Everyone pays the same rate

Every provider in a given service category pays the same commission. There are no premium tiers, no pay-for-placement upgrades, no way to buy a better ranking.

This might seem like an obvious thing, but it’s surprisingly rare. On most platforms, providers who pay more get more visibility. That means the ranking reflects budget, not quality. On Ranky, the rankings mean what they say — and that’s only possible because the economics are uniform.

How AI makes this possible at scale

Historically, the proactive review model — calling every customer, conducting a structured interview, following up weeks later — was limited by the cost of human labor. It worked brilliantly in small markets, but the economics made national expansion impractical.

Ranky uses AI-assisted technology to conduct quality interviews at scale. We’re transparent about this because we think you should know how your reviews are collected. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Consistency. AI follows a validated interview script, asking every customer the same questions in the same way. This eliminates interviewer bias and makes scores directly comparable across providers and regions.

Human oversight. When a customer raises a complex issue, flags a dispute, or simply wants to talk to a person, our team steps in. AI handles the structured collection; humans handle the exceptions.

Real feedback from real people. The customers are real. The experiences are real. The feedback is real. AI is the tool that makes it possible to collect this feedback at the scale a national platform requires — it doesn’t change what’s being collected.