How ranking works
Nothing here can be bought
Every marketplace says its ranking is fair. The question worth asking is what would have to happen for that to stop being true, and whether anyone outside the company would notice. Here is the whole list of what moves a company up, and how the promise is enforced.
What the order is built from
- Whether they actually cover your areaChecked against the area they are paying for, not a radius they typed in.
- Whether they are availableA company that is not taking work is not a useful first result.
- How quickly they replyMeasured from real requests, not from a promise on a profile.
- Whether the final price matched the quoteReported by the customer after the job. This is the signal the trade is worst at and the one people care about most.
- Reviews, weighted for how many there areOne five star review does not outrank a long record. The average is pulled toward the middle until there is enough of it to mean something.
Why this is not just a promise
A policy in a document survives exactly as long as the person who wrote it. So the rule is in the type system instead: the function that produces the ordering is not given any field representing money, and a test asserts its exact list of inputs. Adding a bid, a tier or an ad spend does not produce a worse ranking, it produces a failed build.
The same approach covers the three quote limit, which is a database constraint rather than a rule in the page, and it is tested by writing straight to the table and watching the database refuse.
The cap matters more than the order
Each area holds a fixed number of companies and when it is full it is full. That is the real difference from paying per lead: you are not bidding against everyone who signed up this morning, and a customer is not handed to whoever happened to pay the most that day.
Questions haulers ask
Can a company pay to appear higher?
No. The ranking function is not given any monetary field at all, so there is nothing for money to act on. A test asserts the exact set of inputs, which means adding a paid field breaks the build rather than quietly changing the order.
Does paying for a bigger area help?
It puts a company in front of people in that area, which is what the fee is for. Within an area it changes nothing about the order.
Why is a brand new company not last?
Because an empty record is not a bad record. A company with no history is scored as unknown rather than nought, and gets a small visibility allowance that fades to nothing over roughly two months. Without it the first company into an area would take everything forever and nobody new could get a first job.
Can a company get a bad review removed?
Not by asking. A review is only removed if it breaks the review policy, and objecting to it is not a reason. That refusal is tested.