How we rank

Methodology last reviewed: 7 September 2026

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 "Featured" tag but have zero effect on the order. Here is exactly how the numbers work.

The score, 0 to 100

Every place gets a composite score between 0 and 100. It is a weighted blend of six dimensions:

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. There are no exceptions. This set took effect on 16 July 2026, when paid placement was removed from the score entirely. Every weight set we have scored with is dated, and the dates ship inside the data as well as on this page: a weights change with no dated record would make every score published before it unreproducible, with no way for a reader to tell a method change from an arithmetic error.

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.

Check the arithmetic yourself

Every ranking page has a machine-readable twin at /dataset/rankings/<category>/<city>.json, for example hotels in Lagos. It carries, for every place: the composite score, the six dimension scores behind it, the weights with the date they took effect, and the inputs the scorer read at the moment it ran. The composite is the weighted sum of those six dimension scores, in the order the payload lists them, rounded to three decimals. Nothing else goes into it.

Until 7 September 2026 that sum did not close. The dimension scores were published rounded to two decimals while the composite was summed from the unrounded values, so re-adding the published parts landed up to 0.005 away from the published whole, and a reader checking the top 50 hotels in Lagos could reconcile 28 of them. The dimension scores are now published exactly as they were summed, which is why they carry long decimals. No position moved: the composite is the same number to its last published digit, and only the parts printed beside it were short. Three inputs the score reads and nobody could see (days since the last review, photo count, and the confidence behind the sentiment score) are now published with each place, recorded as they were at the moment of scoring rather than re-read later. Rankings computed before that date are still stored with the shorter numbers. Those rows are flagged in the data as not re-summing exactly, rather than quietly left for a reader to trip over, and they close when the page next recomputes.

How often we disagree with Google

Google's star rating and review volume are 62% of the composite, so a reproducible score could still be a restatement of Google's opinion. This measures how much of the ordering is ours, taken on 7 September 2026 across 6,308 published category and city pages:

On 78.4% of pages, the business ranked #1 is not the highest-Google-rated business on that page. On the other 21.6% it is the same business. Counting only the 6,307 pages that could disagree, meaning more than one listing and more than one distinct rating, the figure is 78.4%. Where we differ, our #1 gives up a median of 0.4 stars.

Where the ordering differs, this is the dimension that moved it:

Method: For every published category and city page with no modifier, take the rows the page renders (the top 50 after the same filters) and compare the place Ranked puts first against the set of places holding the highest Google star rating on that page. A tie on the rating counts as agreement. Pages where no place carries a Google rating are excluded as unmeasurable, and pages with one listing or one rating shared by every listing are reported separately because they could not disagree. Where Ranked differs, the moving dimension is the one with the largest weighted advantage over the best-ranked of the top-rated places. Measured against the weights dated 2026-07-16 by scripts/divergence.ts, which is in the repository and prints this distribution. The figure is republished on each run whatever it says: if our #1 turns out to be Google's best-rated business on most pages, that is the result and it stands here.

Hard rules layered on top

1. Closed permanently. Excluded entirely.
2. Category evidence. Listings must match the specific category. A related service, a shared industry, payment or a claimed profile does not establish that match. Unsupported affiliations are held for review while the business record remains available.
3. Location and relevance. Matching local listings precede explicitly labelled nearby alternatives. Within those groups, category relevance and the published scoring rules determine order, so the displayed score alone does not describe every ordering decision.
4. 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

Google ratings, review counts, hours and photos are re-fetched on a rolling schedule when the Google feed is available to us; higher-ranked places refresh before long-tail entries. Independently of that feed, rankings recompute every six hours for facets whose own data changed, such as a new review published on Ranked, a claim, a verification, or a closure.

Reviews on Ranked

• SMS one-time code required. Every review written on Ranked is tied to a Nigerian mobile number confirmed by a one-time code at submission. We do not accept anonymous reviews; a reviewer may withhold their name from display, but not from us.
• Moderation. Reviews are held before they appear. A review that trips a check, such as a libel risk, self-promotion, or a contact-detail dump, waits for a human; the rest are published after a hold. Negative reviews are never removed to help a business's position.
• Generic reviews are voided automatically. A review with no checkable content, with no named item, price, date, staff member, location or account of what happened, such as "great place, nice service, 5 stars, highly recommend", is rejected at submission with the reason shown to the reviewer. It never reaches moderation, never displays and never feeds a rank.
• "Verified visit" is a narrow claim. That label means the reviewer contacted the business through Ranked before reviewing. It does not mean Ranked confirmed that a visit or a purchase took place.
• What Ranked reviews do to the score. The rating and volume dimensions are Google's numbers. A review written on Ranked counts toward review recency once published, and its text is read for sentiment.

Corrections

If a ranking, a listing fact or anything on this page is wrong, email support@ranked.ng with the page URL and what is wrong. We publish corrections: a corrected page changes visibly and its "last modified" date moves, and a change to the method changes the date at the top of this page. We do not edit quietly.

Transparency

Every place card shows its score breakdown. Click "Why ranked #N?". If you believe a ranking is wrong, write to us with the specifics (see Corrections below). 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 "Featured" 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.

Frequently asked questions