How we rank
Ranked uses a transparent composite score to order every business in our directory. Most rankings are 100% organic. There is one paid exception — the Elite tier — and we disclose it openly here and on every page where it appears. The Featured and Premium paid tiers exist too, but their boost is capped so a paid 3.5★ place can never out-rank a great unpaid 4.8★ one. Here is exactly how the numbers work.
The score, 0–100
Every place gets a composite score between 0 and 100. It is a weighted blend of seven dimensions:
| Dimension | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Google rating | 36% | Sigmoid-normalised star rating. 4.5★ ≈ 85; 4.0★ ≈ 62; 3.0★ ≈ 18. |
| Review volume | 22% | Logarithmic of total Google reviews, capped at 1,000+. |
| Review recency | 12% | Exponential decay over one year. Recent reviews score higher. |
| Profile completeness | 10% | Has a website, phone, and at least 3 photos. |
| Review sentiment | 10% | LLM-derived sentiment over the most recent reviews. Surfaces "5★ but bad" gaps that pure ratings hide. |
| Verification | 5% | Independently verified via NigeriaVerified (rolling out). |
| Featured placement | 5% | Paid placement signal — capped (see hard rule 2 below). |
Weights sum to 100%. They are stored in code at packages/ranking/src/weights.ts and are publicly auditable in our repository.
Review sentiment is scored by a large language model. The same team also builds NGPT, Nigeria's open language model for Pidgin, Hausa, Yorùbá, Igbo and Nigerian English.
Hard rules layered on top
- Closed permanently — excluded entirely.
- Featured / Premium cap — a Featured- or Premium-tier paid 3.5★ place cannot out-rank an unpaid 4.8★ place. The featured contribution is hard-capped so paid placements at these tiers can lift visibility within a quality band but never cross it.
- Newcomers — places with fewer than 5 reviews are flagged "newcomer" and cannot land in the top 3 unless they hold a featured placement.
- Elite featured (paid #1 — disclosed) — the Elite tier is a paid placement that occupies slot #1. We do not hide this. Every Elite listing carries a visible "Sponsored" tag, and the #1 organic winner (highest composite score) is shown immediately below at slot #2 with full score breakdown. If multiple Elites exist in the same category × city, the #1 slot rotates between them across pageviews. Slots #2 onward are always pure organic order.
Why a sigmoid for ratings?
Most well-run businesses on Google cluster between 4.2 and 4.7 stars. A linear scale flattens that range — a sigmoid widens the gap where it matters and compresses the long tail of 2.x ratings into "obviously poor."
Refresh cadence
We re-fetch every place from Google on a rolling schedule. Higher-ranked places refresh more frequently than long-tail entries. New reviews, ratings, hours, and photos flow in continuously, and rankings recompute as data updates.
Transparency
Every place card shows its score breakdown — click "Why ranked #N?". If you believe a ranking is wrong, contact us with the specifics. We will investigate and, if the algorithm got it wrong, fix the algorithm — not the individual page.
What we don't do
- We do not accept payment to manipulate organic ranks #2 and below. Slots #2+ on every page are the pure output of the composite score above.
- We do not remove negative reviews. Google's review corpus is the source of truth.
- We do not hide our methodology. This page is the algorithm. The weights are in our public code at
packages/ranking/src/weights.ts. - We do not pretend Elite is organic. It is a paid #1 placement, visibly labeled "Sponsored" on every page where it appears.