How RestorationIndex ranks companies

How does RestorationIndex rank companies?

RestorationIndex gives each company one number out of 100, added up from three pillars. The score is deterministic, meaning the same data always produces the same rank, and every input is printed on the company's own profile page, pillar by pillar, so you can see where each point came from. We publish the whole method so anyone can audit a position on any of our 294 listings.

Why those three weights, for this trade. Nobody shops around for a restoration company. A basement floods at 2am, you call whoever answers, and the work is contamination work where doing it badly is a health problem rather than an ugly driveway. So reviews carry the most weight at 40: they are the only input that comes from customers rather than from the company. What a company states on its own site carries an unusually high 35, because in this trade those statements are specific and load-bearing: IICRC certification, WSIB coverage and liability insurance are exactly the three things every consumer guide tells you to ask about before letting a crew cut into a wall. The record is worth 25: answering the phone and keeping a working website are table stakes in an emergency trade, worth points, not worth more than the two above.

Pillar one: what its customers said (40 points)

26 of these 40 points come from the star rating and 14 from how many people left one, log-scaled and capped at 200reviews. The rating is adjusted first, because a raw star rating is misleading when the review count is tiny. RestorationIndex blends each company's rating with the dataset average, treating every company as if it started with 10 imaginary reviews at the mean of 4.76 stars. A company with thousands of reviews barely moves, while a 5.0 built on 4 reviews is pulled toward the average until it earns more history. An adjusted rating of 3.5 or below scores nothing here; 5.0 scores the full 26.

This is the same shrinkage approach behind IMDb's Top 250 and other credible ranking systems. The effect: on RestorationIndex, a proven 4.8 rating over 300 reviews outranks an unproven perfect score, which is what most homeowners would pick anyway.

Pillar two: what it states on its own site (35 points)

Every company on this site that has a web address had it fetched once, and whatever the page said about licensing, insurance, WSIB coverage, standards bodies and how long the company has been going was recorded along with the exact sentence it was read from. No sentence, no point: a finding with nothing to quote is not recorded at all. Licence and insurance rows are capped together at 12, and standards bodies at 8, so a page listing every acronym it can think of cannot outrun a page that says two true things.

Read the wording of every row below carefully. Each one says says. This is what a company wrote about itself and a crawler read on one day. Nobody here phoned a registry, asked the WSIB for a clearance certificate or saw a certificate of insurance. That is why a profile prints “Says it is licensed” and never “Licensed”, and it is why the sentence behind each one is kept in this site's public data file where you can check it against the company's own page. Ask for the documents yourself before work starts.

Two kinds of sentence are found by a word search and thrown away before scoring. A page telling you what to check, such as “confirm that the company carries liability insurance”, is advice to a reader, not a claim by the business, and scoring it would award points for a sentence saying the opposite. And a review badge from a review platform is not a body anyone joins, so it earns nothing.

Pillar three: website and record (25 points)

Small points for signals that a business is real, reachable and active, plus the themes that keep coming up across a company's own stored reviews, capped at 6 because review volume is already paid for in pillar one.

A website that did not answer is worth 2rather than nothing, and here is the line this site draws, because it is a judgement and you are entitled to see it. A domain that does not resolve at all, refuses the connection, returns a server error or a 404, or now answers with somebody else's business, scores as not answering: a lapsed domain gets rebought. But a bot block, a robots.txt refusal and a timeout score 8, nearly the full 10, because none of those is evidence a site is gone. A person with a browser is very likely served the page normally. Most of the error codes this crawl saw were bot blocks rather than dead addresses, and calling those dead would have published a false statement about a trading business in order to tidy up a table.

None of this removes, hides or filters a company. A contractor whose domain lapsed is a contractor with a lapsed domain, and being unreachable from a data centre is not evidence anyone stopped trading.

What does the ranking look like in practice?

Here are two example companies scored by the real scorer, on the live July 2026 dataset mean of 4.76 stars. AquaShield has a perfect rating but only 8reviews and says almost nothing about itself. GTA Mold & Water holds 4.8 stars over 280 reviews, states on its own site that it holds a licence, states that it carries insurance, names a standards body, and says it has been going more than 20 years. Watch how the adjustment and the other two pillars settle the order.

GTA Mold & Water wins: 86 versus 48. The perfect 5.0 shrinks toward the mean on only 8 reviews, and AquaShield has published nothing about its licensing, its insurance or the bodies it belongs to, so two of the three pillars are close to empty.

What happens to a company with almost no reviews?

Nothing special, and that is worth saying plainly. There is no rule in the code that sends thin listings to the bottom of the page. Two things act on them, both described above. The prior pulls a 5.0 built on two reviews most of the way back to 4.76, so it scores around the middle of the reviews pillar rather than at the top. And the other 60 points are still there to be earned: a company with four reviews that states its licensing on its own site and keeps a working website can sit above a well-reviewed company that does neither. If you see a five-star firm partway down this list with a handful of reviews, that is the formula working, not a mistake.

Three things do change below three reviews. The star rating is not printed on the company's profile, it is left out of the structured data handed to search engines, and the company is left out of every average and share quoted on this site. A company with no rating and no reviews at all is also marked no-index and kept out of the sitemap. Closed businesses are not screened out of the dataset, and this page used to say they were. The records were collected in July 2026and the export carries no closed-or-open field, so nothing has ever been dropped for being closed. Check the company's own Google record before you rely on it.

Every web address on this site was fetched on August 26, 2026. 17 of them are not linked from their profile: the domain no longer answers, or it answers with a business that has nothing to do with the listing, because a lapsed domain gets rebought. A bot block, a slow response or a “coming soon” page is not counted, because none of those is evidence a site is gone. The company stays listed either way: a lapsed domain is not evidence anyone stopped trading.

What does it mean when RestorationIndex says a company is in an area?

It means the map pin on that company's Google listing is closer to that neighbourhood than to any other one we track. That is the whole of it. We take the latitude and longitude, find the nearest of the 45 places in the dataset, and keep the distance alongside it. Nothing in the dataset records a service area, so an area page is a list of who is nearest, not a list of who will come.

The difference is large, and this site can measure it. Of the 128 companies here whose own website states a coverage area, 67 say they cover the whole Greater Toronto Area. So a homeowner in Mississauga reading the 11 companies on that area page is seeing a small part of the field that would actually take the job. Read the area as a starting point and ask on the phone.

Until 2026-08-19 these pages said the listed companies “serve” the area. They cannot know that, so they no longer say it.

Where does RestorationIndex's data come from?

RestorationIndex pulls ratings, review counts and business details from public Google Maps profiles, then enriches each record from the company's own website for services, photos and contact details. Market pricing is researched separately for each of the 6 kinds of work the dataset labels, published under the 4 category hubs the site keeps, and every figure cites a named GTA contractor or authority, so you can trace it. We do not scrape private data or buy reviews.

How often does RestorationIndex refresh its data?

The current RestorationIndex dataset is stamped July 2026. We refresh review data and re-run the ranking on a rolling basis so positions track current reputation, and every page shows a visible last-updated date. If a business is sold, closed or corrects its details, write to hello@restorationindex.ca and we update the record between scheduled refreshes.

What are the limits of RestorationIndex's rankings?

A ranking is a strong starting point, not a guarantee. The reviews are Google's, not ours, so they carry Google's own biases. RestorationIndex does not verify a contractor's WSIB coverage, liability insurance, IICRC certification or licences, and a high rank does not vouch for any single job. Always get 3 written quotes, check insurance directly, and read recent reviews before you hire. RestorationIndex helps you build the shortlist; the due diligence is still yours.