How we rank.

The signals.

We do not publish the exact weighting formula. We do publish the inputs that can affect a vendor’s position, and we apply those inputs the same way across vendors in a category.

Profile completeness

How fully the profile is filled in — logo, description, website, HQ, founding year, employee band, integrations, pricing information. Every present field pulls the score up; blanks pull it down. This is the lever vendors control directly: the more accurate and complete the profile, the higher the rank.

Recency

Profiles we’ve verified recently are treated as fresher than profiles that have gone a long time without a review. This prevents stale entries from squatting on top slots.

Verified reviews

Published review signals can improve rank when they meet our quality gates. Verified reviews carry additional trust because they are tied to a completed verification workflow, not just a public submission. Review quality, review volume, review freshness, and verified-review presence all matter.

Tier signal

Protier vendors — those who have claimed their profile and pay for the enhanced listing — receive a limited tier signal. That’s the only paid input to the ranked list. Sponsor placements are visually distinct from organic rank and appear in Sponsored slots above the ranked list.

Primary-category fit

A vendor can live in multiple categories, but every profile names exactly one as its primary. On a category page, vendors for whom the current category is primary are a better fit than vendors listed only as a secondary match. This keeps a practice-management suite from crowding out a session-note specialist on the session-notes page.

Sponsored vs. ranked.

Sponsored slots sit abovethe ranked list and are visually distinct. They’re paid placements and they do not participate in the score. When we render a category, we render sponsored entries first (flagged as sponsored), then the ranked list below. The two never mix. If a vendor in the ranked list also happens to sponsor the category, their ranked entry reflects the signals above — the sponsored slot is on top of that, not instead of it.

What we don’t do.

We don’t take money to reorder the ranked list. We don’t hand-tune the order for customers or prospects. We don’t let vendors see their neighbors’ scores or submit counter-signals. We don’t promise top-five placement as part of any commercial agreement. The methodology is applied consistently.

See a ranking that looks wrong? Tell us — the suggest-an-edit form goes to the moderation queue and reviewed corrections flow directly into the next rerank pass (nightly).

Clinic finder ranking.

Results on Find ABAare sorted into four groups: paid & claimed (Pro / Sponsor), claimed free, pending claims, and unclaimed. A claimed clinic always outranks an unclaimed one, regardless of completeness or other signals.

Within a group, we sort by waitlist availability (accepting first), profile completeness, and recency of last verification. Sponsor clinics carry a visible Sponsoredchip; we cap how many can appear near the top so a single big spender can’t crowd out a city page.

State pages, plan-only pages, and state-plus-plan pages use the same ranker as city pages — applied to the broader result set. The four ranking groups (claimed-tier, claimed, pending, unclaimed), the within-group sort signals (waitlist availability, completeness, last verified), and the sponsor cap all behave identically across every /find-aba surface.

Source · lib/rank/clinics-search.ts