How AsphaltPavingIndex ranks contractors
Last updated: By The Pavement Desk
Every contractor is ordered by one published score out of 100, and none of them can pay to move up. This page shows every point of it: what the score reads, what each part is worth, and, just as important, what nobody here has checked. If one firm sits above another on AsphaltPavingIndex, this is precisely why, and you can recompute it yourself before you put either on a bid list.
How is the score calculated?
Each firm gets one number out of 100, added up from three parts. It is deterministic, meaning the same data always produces the same order, and it is published in full here so anyone can audit a position on any of the 376 listings, which matters when the order is feeding a tender list.
| Pillar | Out of | What it reads |
|---|---|---|
| Reviews and reputation | 45 | A Bayesian-adjusted version of the Google star rating, plus review volume on a log scale. The only pillar sourced from customers rather than from the firm. |
| What it states on its own website | 30 | Findings read off the firm's own pages: how long it says it has been going, licence and insurance sentences, trade bodies it names, online booking. Every one carries the sentence it was read from. |
| Website and record | 25 | Whether the website answered when we fetched it, themes its reviewers keep repeating, photographs, phone, hours, and the areas it says it serves. |
Reviews carry the most because they are the only part of this that comes from customers instead of from a firm's own marketing, and because the record here is genuinely there: most firms on this site hold at least 3 stored reviews. What a firm states about itself earns less for the opposite reason, which is that it wrote the words itself. It still earns a real share, because on an occupied commercial property, insurance and how long a firm has been trading are what a property manager is actually screening for.
What is a Bayesian-adjusted rating?
A raw star rating is misleading when the review count is tiny, and a contractor that has done four small jobs can otherwise sit above one with a decade on working sites. The fix is to blend each firm's rating with the dataset average, treating every firm as if it started with 10 imaginary reviews at the mean of 4.46 stars. A firm with thousands of reviews barely moves, while a 5.0 built on 4 reviews is pulled toward the average until it earns more history.
adjusted = (v / (v + 10)) × R + (10 / (v + 10)) × mean
where R = Google rating, v = review count, mean = 4.46
That adjusted figure is then mapped onto 30 of the 45 review points, from 3.5★ at the bottom to 5.0★ at the top. The remaining 15 come from review volume on a log scale, levelling off at 200 reviews: the difference between 5 reviews and 50 is worth a great deal, the difference between 200 and 400 almost nothing.
What does a firm earn for what it says about itself?
On August 19, 2026 we read every website on this site, 376records in all, and recorded only what we could take a sentence from. No sentence, no point: nothing here is inferred, and there is no “probably” in the data.
Read every row below literally. It is a record of what a firm wrote about itselfand a crawler read. Nobody here rang a registry, a broker or the WSIB. That is why these appear on a profile as “Says it holds a licence” rather than as a badge: the first is something we can stand behind, the second would be a claim we have never checked. Sentences that merely contain the words do not count either. A page telling you to make sure your contractor holds a licence is advice to you, not a claim about them, and it scores nothing.
| What it says | Adds |
|---|---|
| Says it holds a licence on its own site | +4 |
| Says it carries insurance on its own site | +4 |
| Says it carries WSIB coverage on its own site | +3 |
| Says it carries a bond on its own site | +2 |
| Names a trade body it says it belongs to (each) | +3 |
| States 20 years or more in business | +10 |
| Takes bookings online | +2 |
Years in business is graded rather than flat: 10 at twenty years or more, 8 at ten to nineteen, 5 at three to nine and 3below that. The arithmetic uses the year the crawl ran, not today's date, so a page built next year cannot quietly add a year to a fact nobody re-read.
What does the website and record part read?
The largest piece is whether the website answered at all, and we are deliberately careful about what a failure means. A bot block, a browser challenge, a timeout or a robots.txt refusal is not counted as a dead firm: something is there and our crawler could not see it, which a person with a browser very likely can. Those score 8 rather than the full 10. Only a domain that does not resolve, refuses the connection, returns a server error or a missing page, or answers with somebody else's business, drops to 2. A firm with no website on file scores 0 here and is not penalised anywhere else for it.
No firm is ever hidden, filtered or dropped because of this. Being unreachable from a data centre is not evidence that anyone stopped trading, and a contractor with a lapsed domain is a contractor with a lapsed domain.
| Signal | Adds |
|---|---|
| Website answered when we fetched it | +10 |
| Website there, our crawler turned away | +8 |
| Website did not answer at the last check | +2 |
| Theme its reviewers keep repeating (each) | +1 |
| 3 or more project photographs | +3 |
| Phone on file | +2 |
| Hours posted | +2 |
| Service areas stated on its site | +2 |
The review themes come from a closed list of 26phrases and are read only from reviews already stored on the record, never from a fresh crawl of anyone's reviews. Each one carries the reviewer's own sentence, printed on the profile, and a firm with fewer than 3 stored reviews gets none at all rather than a thin guess.
What does the ranking look like in practice?
Here are two example firms scored with the live August 2026 dataset mean of 4.46 stars. Firm A has a perfect rating but only 8 reviews and little on its website; Firm B holds 4.8 stars over 280 reviews with a full record. Watch how the adjustment settles the order.
| Firm | Rating | Reviews | Adjusted | Reviews pts | Says | Record | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firm A (example) | 5.0★ | 8 | 4.699 | 30/45 | 6/30 | 14/25 | 50 |
| Firm B (example) | 4.8★ | 280 | 4.788 | 41/45 | 22/30 | 23/25 | 86 |
Firm B leads: 86 against 50. The perfect 5.0 shrinks toward the mean on only 8 reviews, and Firm B's volume and fuller record hold its position.
Which contractors are excluded or ranked last?
Closed firms are not screened out, and this page used to say they were. The records behind this site were collected in August 2026and the export carries no closed-or-open field, so no firm has ever been dropped for having shut down. Check a firm's own Google record before you put it on a bid list. Firms with fewer than 3 reviews or a rating below 4.0 still get a profile page for completeness, but they rank below every firm that has enough record to read, whatever score they earn, so they sit at the bottom of every list they appear on until they earn one. Where a page has fewer firms above that line than its first block holds, you will see one of them there, at the end.
Every web address on this site was fetched on August 26, 2026. 30 of them are not linked from their profile: the domain no longer answers, or it answers with a business that has nothing to do with the listing, because a lapsed domain gets rebought. A bot block, a slow response or a “coming soon” page is not counted, because none of those is evidence a site is gone. The company stays listed either way: a lapsed domain is not evidence anyone stopped trading.
Where does the data come from?
Ratings, review counts and business details come from public Google Maps profiles, then each record is enriched from the contractor's own website for services and contact details. Rates across 9trade categories are researched separately, and every figure cites a named GTA contractor, a municipal unit-price estimate or a published cost guide, so you can trace it to its source. We do not scrape private data or buy reviews, and we never re-crawl anyone's Google reviews: the themes on a profile are read from the reviews already stored on the record.
How often is the data refreshed?
The current dataset is stamped August 2026, and the websites behind it were last read for this score on August 19, 2026. Review data is refreshed and the ranking re-run on a rolling basis so positions track the current record, and every page carries its own last-updated date rather than one site-wide stamp. If a firm is sold, closed or has a detail wrong, the correction process on the contact page updates the record between scheduled refreshes.
What are the limits of this ranking?
A position is a starting point for a bid list, not a qualification. The reviews are Google's, not ours, so they carry Google's own biases, and a lot of commercial work never generates a public review at all. Everything in the middle pillar is a firm describing itself. AsphaltPavingIndex does not verify WSIB clearance, liability coverage, bonding capacity or any municipal licence, and a high position vouches for nothing about a specific site. Take three written bids on an identical scope, ask for current certificates naming the property, and call the property manager at two comparable sites. The list narrows the field; the due diligence stays yours.
Read the editorial standards behind this