How we rank
detailers
Every detailer is scored by TopScore, a single 0–100 number that answers one question: how confident can a customer be that this is a genuinely top detailer?
Every listing clears a bar to be here at all
Nobody is listed on request, and nobody is listed by paying. To appear at all, a business must be a real Google-listed detailing company with at least 5 reviews and a 4.0★ average, categorised as a detailer rather than a car wash, body shop, mechanic or supply business. Everything below that line is never published.
A deeper check runs listing by listing
It costs money per business and involves reading their website, so it runs in batches rather than all at once. 2,252 of 9,714 listings (23%) have been through it so far:
| Open for business | We ask Google directly whether the business is still operating, and remove anything permanently closed. |
|---|---|
| Live website | We fetch the site and record whether it is dead, parked or broken. A well-reviewed detailer with no working website is still a real business, so that alone does not remove them. |
| Recent activity | Businesses with no reviews in roughly two years are treated as inactive. |
| Actually a detailer | We read the site and remove car washes, body shops, mechanics, tint-only and supply businesses. |
| A usable website | Blank, template-default and spammy sites are recorded as low quality. |
Listings that have not been through it yet are ranked on their review record alone. We would rather tell you which is which than imply a check we have not run.
Then we score with TopScore
Every detailer gets a single 0–100 TopScore. The base score uses what we hold for every listing:
| Reputation · 55% | The rating we can defend, not the one displayed. Credibility-adjusted, then reduced by how uncertain that average still is: a shop with 5 reviews gives up about 0.4 stars, one with 500 gives up 0.04, one with 12,000 gives up almost nothing. This is what stops a flawless handful of reviews from leading a city. |
|---|---|
| Review volume · 30% | How many customers have weighed in, on a diminishing-returns scale that keeps separating shops well past the point most directories stop counting. |
| Published pricing · 10% | Whether they print what the work costs. Under a third of shops do. It breaks ties between shops the reviews cannot separate — it never overturns them. |
| Proof of work · 5% | Photographs of their own work, and manufacturer credentials. A credential a brand confirmed counts for more than one a shop prints on its own homepage. |
Every one of those is a fact we can show you on the listing. None of them is a shop's own description of itself, and none can be bought. Claiming a listing buys no position: it lets an owner give us facts we would otherwise have to read off their website, and a shop that never claims reaches the same score by publishing the same things publicly, because we read those too.
What we changed, and why
Until September 2026 the formula was 70% rating, 22% volume and 8% service breadth, and it did not work. Every listing clears a 4.0 floor and the average is 4.9, so the 70% term barely varied; volume stopped counting at 300 reviews, which is the 90th percentile, so the whole top of every city tied. That left an 8% count of self-declared service tags deciding the order — the least verifiable thing we hold. In one Florida city a shop with 160 reviews ranked above one with 12,498 because it listed seven services instead of four. We would rather publish that than quietly restate the number.
On a service page, we rank differently
TopScore answers "who is the best detailer in this city". It is the wrong instrument for "who should install my ceramic coating", and we would rather say so than stretch it. Rating is 70% of the base score, and because we only list businesses at 4.0 and above (with the great majority at 4.5 or better), the input that actually moves TopScore between two good shops is review volume. Volume measures how long a shop has been collecting reviews and how hard it asks for them. It barely moves with price transparency, and only weakly with credentials.
So where we rank shops for one specific job rather than for the city as a whole, the score is built on evidence about that job, things Google and Yelp do not show you:
| Evidence · 30% | Do they show they do this work? Publishing a price for it counts fullest, listing it on a claimed profile next, naming it as a service least. |
|---|---|
| Credential · 18% | A relevant manufacturer credential, worth most when the brand's own installer list confirms it and less when only the shop says so. |
| Transparency · 16% | Whether they publish prices at all, and state where they work. Review count does not predict this. |
| Activity · 14% | Confirmed open, recently reviewed, with a site that answers. |
| Focus · 12% | How much of their published pricing sits in this category. That is the specialist signal. |
| Confidence · 10% | Credibility-adjusted rating, compressed on purpose. It breaks ties; it does not do the ranking. |
A shop with no evidence of doing the work is not ranked low on that page. It is not on it. Today that leaves 5,375 with evidence of ceramic coating, 1,545 with evidence of ppf, 3,835 with evidence of paint correction. Every card says in words why it sits where it does, because a ranking you can read is an argument and one you cannot is an assertion.
Where each fact comes from
Not everything on a listing is known the same way, and treating a shop’s own claim as though a third party had confirmed it is how directories end up overstating. Every field we hold carries one of four levels, and nothing is presented above the level it was collected at.
| Verified | Confirmed by a source with no stake in the ranking. Business name, address, phone, location. |
|---|---|
| From Google | Google’s own data, refreshed on a schedule and dated on the record. Rating, review count, whether the business is still open. |
| They say | Stated by the business on its own website. We report it as their claim. Prices, services offered, manufacturer certifications, anything an owner adds after claiming. |
| Our reading | Our own reading of the available text. Used for ranking and filtering, never presented as fact. Review summaries, specialties, TopScore itself. |
In practice that means a price on this site is what a detailer advertises, not a quote for your vehicle; a certification is what a shop states on its own website until we have checked it against the manufacturer’s own installer list; and a review summary is our reading of what customers wrote, not a claim about the business.
Our principles
The commercial firewall: purchasing websites, SEO, advertising, review services, leads or any other service from Savo Group has no effect on TopScore, rankings, verification, editorial coverage or placement. Commercial services and directory recommendations are separate decisions.
- No pay-to-play. Placement cannot be bought, and no amount of money moves a listing up. Claiming doesn't buy position. It lets us verify things we otherwise cannot, such as hours, prices and certifications, and verified facts count for more than unverified ones, the same rule that applies everywhere else on the site. A claim on its own moves nothing, and a shop that never claims can earn the same weight by publishing the same facts on its own website, because we read those too.
- Verified, and we say how far that has got. 2,252 of 9,714 listings have been through the full check. The rest clear the entry bar (a real, categorised detailing business with a genuine review record) and are described that way rather than borrowing a badge they have not earned yet.
- Grounded in real reviews. Summaries are synthesized from genuine customer reviews. We never invent prices, quotes, or criticisms.
- Transparent. The checks and weights above are the whole formula: no hidden inputs and no factor we have not named. Where a check has not been run yet, this page says so.