How we grade businesses
Every business on MyTriangleServices can earn a letter grade from A+ to F. The grade is our opinion. It is computed from the inputs below and nothing else. There is no editorial thumb on the scale, and paying us does not change it.
What counts
Every graded business is scored out of 100%, split across the inputs below. The same split runs for every business, in every category.
Verified review score
The average star rating from reviews published on MyTriangleServices, adjusted for volume. A company with two five-star reviews does not outrank one with sixty four-star reviews. Two reviews is an afternoon of asking friends, and we weight it accordingly.
Verification
Whether the business holds an active NC license where its category requires one, whether it carries insurance we have verified ourselves and how much it covers, and how long it has been in business. Every one of these is something we can check for ourselves. Insurance a business has told us about but that we have not yet checked is shown on their profile as self-reported and counts for nothing here.
Responsiveness
How reliably and how quickly the business replies to customers who contact them through us, and whether they respond to reviews. We measure this ourselves, so it cannot be gamed.
Trait ratings
The category-specific scores reviewers give, like price, communication, punctuality, and quality of work.
When we don’t have data for one of these inputs, it is excluded and the remaining weights are rebalanced. A business is never marked down for a gap in our information about them.
What we track but don’t count yet
Review recency
0%How recent a company's reviews are. Currently carries no weight: we are new, so nobody has recent reviews yet, and grading businesses on that would measure our age rather than their work. It will be introduced once there's enough review volume for it to mean something.
What never counts
Whether a business pays us
Sponsored placement affects where a company appears in some lists, always labeled, and never what it is graded.
Ratings from Google, Yelp, or Facebook
We show those on profiles for context, but they are collected from other sites, measure a different set of customers, and are never blended into our rating or grade.
Anything we haven't published here
If an input isn't on this page, it isn't in the grade.
One formula, run the same way for everyone
Every business is scored by the same inputs at the same weights, whatever their category and whether or not they pay us. Nobody here hand-edits a letter grade.
We stamp a methodology version on every grade and keep a dated record of the exact inputs it was computed from, so a number published today can be explained years later. When we change how grading works, we say so, in plain language, further down this page.
When a business has no grade
We don’t publish a grade until a business has at least 3 rated reviews. Below that, a grade would be noise, and we’re not willing to publish noise about someone’s livelihood. Those profiles show no grade rather than a low one.
Grade bands
The minimum score for each letter, out of 100.
If you disagree with your grade
Every business can respond publicly to any review on their profile, and claiming your business lets you supply the license and insurance information that several of these inputs depend on. Supplying it does not move your grade on its own. We show it as self-reported until someone here has checked a certificate of insurance, and only then does it count. That is deliberate: a grade you could raise by typing a number into a form would not be worth publishing.
If you believe a review is fake or a fact is wrong, you can formally dispute your grade: claim your business and open the Grade tab in your dashboard. A person reads every dispute and replies with a decision and a reason.
A dispute can fix a fact. If you show us an input is wrong, say a review from someone who was never your customer, or a license record matched to the wrong business, we correct that information, and your grade recalculates from it like everyone else’s does. What a dispute can’t do is move a grade because you disagree with it. Nobody here hand-edits a letter grade, for anyone, at any price. And when we do correct something after a business challenges us, we say so on their profile. If we were wrong, that’s our mistake to disclose, not theirs.
What has changed
15 July 2026: self-reported insurance no longer counts
Insurance you tell us about now scores zero until we have actually checked the certificate. It previously earned partial credit, which meant a business could improve its own grade by typing a coverage amount into a form. That was our mistake and it is fixed.
26 grades went down as a result. None went up. If yours is one of them, nothing about your business changed. We corrected something that should never have counted in the first place. Show us your certificate and the points come back, properly earned this time.
Telling us about insurance we haven’t verified is still worth doing: it shows on your profile, clearly marked as your word rather than ours, and it is what starts the verification. It just doesn’t move the number any more.
Methodology version 2026-07-15.1. We keep a dated record of every grade and the exact inputs it was computed from, so a grade published today can always be explained later.