Last updated: August 9, 2026
Every business on Listing.ng carries a score out of 100. It is not an opinion, it is not for sale, and it is not a rating of how good the business is at its job — it is a measure of how much has actually been checked and how much a stranger can see for themselves. Here is exactly what goes into it.
A score is built from what we verified about the business, whether a real person behind it has proved who they are, the reviews customers have left, how complete the listing is, how long the business has been on the register, and any unresolved reports against it. Nothing else touches it.
This is the single largest contributor, and it is the one thing we do ourselves rather than infer. It covers a confirmed phone number, a confirmed email, and where a business has submitted them, registration documents that a person on our side has read. A listing that says "verified" and cannot show when or how that check happened is treated as unverified, because a badge with no record behind it is a claim, not a check.
A business whose owner has verified their own identity scores higher than one that has not. It is the difference between a business that exists and a business with a named, reachable person accountable for it.
Both how many and how good. A handful of reviews moves the score more than none; a strong average moves it further. It levels off deliberately — a business with hundreds of reviews is not two hundred times more trustworthy than one with ten, and treating it that way would make the score a popularity contest.
A phone number, an email, a website, an area, a real description and a list of what the business offers. This is the part entirely within an owner’s control, and it is worth saying plainly: a complete listing is not a trustworthy business, it is a business that has shown you enough to judge for yourself.
Tenure counts for a little and is capped low. It rewards businesses that have been here and stayed, without making it impossible for a new business to earn a decent score.
Unresolved reports pull the score down, and they are the only input that can. A report has to be reviewed before it counts, so a competitor cannot damage a score by filing complaints. Once a report is resolved it stops counting against the business.
Strong is 85 and above: verified, reviewed, complete, with nothing outstanding. Fair is 50 to 84: real and checkable, with gaps. Below 50 is thin, and thin does not mean bad — it usually means new, or unverified, or simply that nobody has proved anything yet. Thin is a statement about what we know, not about the business.
It is not for sale. No plan, no advertisement and no amount of money moves a score, and a sponsored listing is labelled as sponsored precisely so that paid placement is never mistaken for earned standing. It is not editorial — nobody at Listing.ng adjusts an individual score by hand. And it is not a review of quality: a scrupulous new plumber and an established one with the same paperwork will not have the same score, because one of them has more that we have been able to check.
Every listing shows its own breakdown: each factor, what it contributed, and what would improve it. That receipt is generated from the same calculation that produced the score, not written separately, so the two cannot drift apart. If a score moves, the owner is told what moved it.
Owners can see their full breakdown when signed in, and most low scores come down to something unfinished rather than something disputed. If you believe a score reflects a mistake on our side — a verification we did not record, or a report that should have been resolved — open a support ticket and a person will look at it.