How we rank
Ranked uses a transparent composite score to order every business in our directory. Ranking is 100% organic — no business can pay to change its position. Featured and Premium are paid labels only: they add a visible "Sponsored" tag but have zero effect on the order. 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 six dimensions:
| Dimension | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Google rating | 38% | Sigmoid-normalised star rating. 4.5★ ≈ 85; 4.0★ ≈ 62; 3.0★ ≈ 18. |
| Review volume | 24% | Logarithmic of total Google reviews, capped at 1,000+. |
| Review recency | 13% | 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). |
Weights sum to 100%. They are stored in code at packages/ranking/src/weights.ts, documented in full above, and applied identically to every business — no exceptions.
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.
- Newcomers — places with fewer than 5 reviews are flagged "newcomer" and cannot land in the top 3. Being featured does not change this.
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.
Verified facts (schools)
Some school pages show a "Verified facts" panel — accreditation and government-approval status with a source and date beside every entry. The rules behind it:
- Every fact is cited or it doesn't show. Today, facts come from official regulator registers (e.g. the National Universities Commission's list of approved universities). Owner-submitted documents and attributed third-party indices will join under the same rules as those pipelines launch. A number without a source cannot appear on the site — the database physically requires the citation.
- We stand behind the source, not beyond it. A register fact means "this register lists this school." A school-supplied fact means "the verified school stated this, and showed us a document." We never present either as more than it is — and Nigeria publishes no official per-school WAEC/JAMB league tables, so any site showing you per-school pass rates is estimating.
- Verified facts never move rankings. They are profile information. Ranking position stays the pure output of the review-based score above, so no school can climb the list by making claims about itself.
What we don't do
- We do not sell rank position — at all. Featured/Premium buys a visible "Sponsored" label and nothing more; it has zero effect on the order. Every position on every page is 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 same weights and rules apply to every business, documented in full above.