How the Apprais.ai Reputation Score works
Every provider profile carries a Reputation Score out of 100. It is our own measure, and it is built entirely from public records, facts the firm publishes about itself, and checks we ran ourselves. No review site's rating feeds into it.
That is a deliberate limitation, so be clear about what the number does and does not tell you. It measures how independently checkable a firm is: whether its credentials, tenure, pricing and identity can be confirmed without taking anyone's word for it. It is not a measure of how satisfied a firm's clients are. For that, read the sources we link on each profile.
Across the 83 active profiles in this directory the median score is 51, the highest is 92 and the lowest is 21. A low score is often a thin record on our side rather than a bad firm, which is why the component breakdown is shown on every profile instead of just the total.
The five components
Each is worth 20 points.
| Component | What it scores | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Credentials 20 pts | Professional credentials recorded for the firm: CIH, P.E., P.G., REPA, state surveying licensure and similar. Three or more scores full marks, two scores 15, one scores 10. | State licensing boards and the provider's own published staff credentials. |
| Track record 20 pts | Years in business from a documented founding year. 35+ scores full marks, then 20, 10, 5 and 1 year step down. A firm whose founding year we could not establish scores zero here, which is a gap in our record rather than a mark against the firm. | Company filings and the provider's own about page. |
| Published pricing 20 pts | Whether the firm publishes a price range at all, scored against the services it actually offers. A surveyor that publishes its one ALTA range scores full marks; it is not penalised for failing to quote a Phase 1 ESA it does not perform. A range only counts when we recorded where the provider published it. | The provider's own website. Ranges we estimated ourselves score zero here, and the profile says so. |
| Verifiable identity 20 pts | Whether a buyer can independently confirm who and where this firm is: working website, phone, street address, headquarters state, plus whether the listing has been claimed and whether we corroborated it ourselves. | The provider's own site and structured data, plus our verification pass. |
| Sourcing depth 20 pts | How many distinct sources back the claims on the profile. This one is about the quality of our record, and we show it rather than hide it: a thinly-sourced profile should be read with more caution than a heavily-sourced one. | The profile's own data_sources block. |
How we treat third-party review sources
Provider profiles are about real businesses we have no relationship with, and the major review platforms differ in what they permit republishing. We split them into two tiers and treat each accordingly.
Sources we quote exactly
A source is quoted exactly only where the platform publishes its ratings openly and its own structured-data guidance contemplates third parties displaying an aggregate rating. Where that holds, we show the exact rating and review count and link to the profile so you can check it against the source. We require both the rating and the review count before publishing either: a rating with no count cannot be tied back to a real business listing, and we have seen an employee-satisfaction score arrive in exactly that shape. 21 of our 83 active profiles currently carry a quoted rating, and every one of them names and links its source on the profile itself.
Sources we assess and link
Most of the major review platforms license the display of their scores, through an API, a widget or an accreditation agreement, and some treat their grades and marks as trademarks. We hold none of those licences, so we do not republish their numbers or their marks anywhere on this site. Instead we publish our own three-way classification and link out to the source, which is named on the provider profile beside the assessment it produced:
| Our band | What it means |
|---|---|
| Positive | Our read of the source's signals is favourable overall. |
| Mixed | Meaningfully divided, or good with notable complaints. |
| Negative | Our read of the source's signals is unfavourable overall. |
| Not enough reviews | Fewer than 10 reviews, so we publish no band either way: a perfect score from two reviews is noise, and so is a bad one. |
The band is our editorial judgement about the source's signals, not that source's rating restated, and we label it "our assessment" everywhere it appears. Three buckets over a five-point scale is coarse on purpose: it tells you what you need to decide whether to go read the reviews, without reproducing the platform's score. Where a source expresses itself as a letter grade rather than a number, we classify from the underlying signals, accreditation status, complaint volume and complaint resolution, and never from the grade itself.
Current coverage: 8 assessments across 8 of our 83 active profiles. We do not break that down by platform here. Open any profile and each assessment names the source it came from and links to it.
Employee reviews are shown separately
Employee-review platforms measure what staff say about working somewhere, which is not a proxy for what clients say about the work. Where we have assessed one, it appears under its own "Employee sentiment" heading and never contributes to the Reputation Score. We separate them because the two have been confused before, including by us: eight profiles on this site once carried a rating with no review count in a badge styled as a customer rating, and on the one we could trace exactly the figure turned out to be an employee score. We found them, removed them, and now require both a rating and a count so the shape cannot recur.
What we do not publish
- Review text. We have never republished the wording of anyone's review, and we do not intend to. Read reviews at the source.
- Review-site scores under a cite-only policy. Where a platform licenses the display of its score, its numbers stay off the page and we publish our own band instead.
- Review-site logos, marks or brand colours. Links are plain text, so nothing implies a platform endorsed our assessment.
- Self-reported ratings. A provider claiming its listing cannot supply its own rating or review count.
Corrections
If a score, an assessment or any fact on your profile is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. Claim your listing to correct the underlying data. Every component above is recalculated from that data on the next build, so a correction moves the score automatically.