Ranking Methodology

This page documents exactly how companies are ordered on 10Firms category pages. We publish it so that listed companies and buyers can both audit our reasoning.

Scoring Inputs

A company's position within a category is derived from the following signals:

Signal Weight What it measures
Verified review rating 40% Mean star rating across identity-verified reviews.
Review volume and recency 20% How many verified reviews exist and how recent they are. Older reviews decay in weight.
Category relevance 20% Share of the company's declared service mix that falls in this category. A generalist ranks lower than a specialist here.
Profile completeness 10% Whether pricing, team size, locations, languages, and portfolio data are supplied and current.
Verification status 10% Whether the listing has been claimed and ownership confirmed by our team.

Review Verification Rules

  • Every reviewer confirms their email address via a one-time passcode before publication.
  • Reviews must describe a real engagement, including project scope and approximate budget.
  • Reviews submitted from the listed company's own domain or network are rejected.
  • Incentivised reviews — paid, discounted, or exchanged for anything of value — are prohibited and removed on discovery.
  • A company that is found soliciting fake reviews is delisted.

What Does Not Affect Rankings

  • Advertising spend or paid listing tier.
  • Whether a company has a commercial relationship with 10Firms.
  • Backlinks to 10Firms, social following, or press coverage.
  • Requests from companies to be moved up. We do not honour them.

Sponsored placements, where they appear, are visually labelled and sit outside the ranked list. They never displace an organically ranked result.

Editorial Overrides

In a small number of cases our editorial team manually adjusts a position — for example when a company has recently changed ownership, exited a service line, or is the subject of an unresolved dispute. Overrides are logged internally and applied conservatively.

Disputing a Ranking

If you believe your company is misranked or your category relevance is recorded incorrectly, contact us with the specifics. We will re-examine the underlying data and respond with what we found — including when we conclude the ranking was correct.

Related

See also our trust and verification page and about 10Firms.