How EpoxyFloorIndex ranks companies

How does EpoxyFloorIndex rank companies?

Each company gets one score out of 100, built from three pillars. The score is deterministic, meaning the same data always produces the same rank, and it is the sort order on every category and area page on this site. It is built from 221records: the Google data on each listing, plus a crawl of each company's own website, plus the themes running through the reviews already stored on the record.

Reviews carry the largest share, and a larger share than they would on a directory for a licensed trade. That is deliberate and it is specific to this one. Floor coating in Ontario has no licensing regime and no accreditation body of its own: when we fetched all 221companies' websites, exactly one mentioned an accreditation. There is no register anyone can check, so what previous customers said is very nearly the only independent evidence that exists.

Pillar one: reviews and reputation (45 points)

30 points come from the star rating and 15 from how many reviews are behind it. The rating is Bayesian-adjusted before it is scored: a raw average is misleading when the review count is tiny, so every company is treated as if it started with 10 imaginary reviews at the dataset mean of 4.87 stars. A company with hundreds of reviews barely moves; a 5.0 built on four reviews is pulled toward the average until it earns more history. This is the same shrinkage approach behind IMDb's Top 250.

An adjusted rating at or below 3.5 scores nothing for the rating half. The volume half is logarithmic and saturates at 150 reviews, so the gap between 10 reviews and 50 counts for far more than the gap between 300 and 600. A company with no Google rating at all is scored at the market baseline rather than at zero, and its profile says so.

Pillar two: what it states on its own website (30 points)

We fetched every company's own website and recorded what we could read off the page. Every one of these is a sentence a company wrote about itself. Nobody called a registry, nobody checked a licence number, and nothing here has been confirmed with anyone. That is why each one is printed on a profile as “Says it is licensed” and never as “Licensed”, and why the company's own sentence is printed underneath it so you can see exactly what it said.

Two filters run before any of that is scored, because matching the bare words gets it wrong in this trade specifically. First, “bonded” usually means glue here. Coating pages say things like “creates a chemically bonded foundation for the epoxy system”, which is the coating sticking to the slab, not a bonded contractor. Second, some pages carry buyer's-guide copy telling the reader to “look for a provider that is fully insured”, which is advice to you, not a claim about themselves. Of the 59 licence and insurance sentences the crawl found across this directory, 9 were dropped for those reasons and are scored at nothing. WSIB is counted once, not twice, even though it appears in our data as both a licence mention and a membership.

Pillar three: website and record (25 points)

A website that refuses our crawler is not a dead website. A 403 bot block, a 429 rate limit, a robots.txt refusal, a browser challenge and a timeout all score 8 rather than 2, because none of them is evidence the site is gone, because a person with a browser is very likely served the page normally, and a robots.txt refusal is the site working exactly as intended. Scoring those as dead would publish a false statement about a trading business in order to be tidy. Only a domain that does not resolve, refuses the connection, returns a server error or returns 404 is scored as dead, along with the handful that now answer as an entirely different business because the domain lapsed and was rebought.

None of this removes anybody. A company whose domain lapsed is a company with a lapsed domain, and nothing on this site has been checked for closure. No listing is hidden, filtered or dropped because our crawler could not reach it.

What does the ranking look like in practice?

Two example companies, scored on the live August 2026 dataset mean of 4.87 stars. Lakeview has a perfect rating on only 8 reviews, a bare website and little else on file. Precision holds 4.8 stars over 280 reviews, states several things on its own site and has a complete record.

Precision wins, 86 to 47. The perfect 5.0 shrinks toward the mean on only 8 reviews, and the two pillars Lakeview leaves empty are the ones a homeowner would actually ask about. Across the real directory the score runs 31 to 85, median 58.

Which companies does EpoxyFloorIndex exclude or rank last?

EpoxyFloorIndex does not know which of these businesses have closed, and this page used to say it dropped them. The records behind this site were collected inAugust 2026and the export carries no closed-or-open field, so nothing has ever been dropped for being closed. Check the company's own Google record before you rely on it. Companies with fewer than 3 reviews or a rating below 4.0 still get a profile page for completeness, but they rank last and are kept out of the top-ranked modules until they build a credible track record.

Every web address on this site was fetched on August 26, 2026. 20 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.

What signals does a profile show?

Separate from the ranking score above, every profile shows six record signals. Each one is an observation about the record, such as "this business publishes opening hours", never a judgement about the business or its rating. EpoxyFloorIndex never applies the word "verified" to a business, a rating or a review in its own copy, including in reference to Google review counts, because the word reads as a claim someone checked something and nobody did. Quoted review text is the reviewer's own wording and is published as written.

The sixth signal, that a company's own website describes floor coating work, currently holds for 156 of our 221 listings. It means the business says so, in its own words, on its own site. It does not mean we confirmed the company does the work. The rest are not disproven: their website did not load when we checked it, or it never described floor coating work in a way our process could read. The absence of this signal is silence, not evidence against a business.

EpoxyFloorIndex never verifies a coating company's licence, its insurance or its WSIB standing, never visits a job or a shop, and never contacts the business. Every signal on this page is an observation about the public record, and nothing more.

Where does EpoxyFloorIndex's data come from?

EpoxyFloorIndex is built in four steps. We scrape business records from public Google Maps profiles, enrich each one from the company's own website for services, photos and contact details, run a relevance filter that drops businesses working in other trades so a landscaper or a flooring retailer with no coating work does not end up on a coating directory, then apply AI-assisted editorial with human review before anything publishes. Market pricing across 5 categories is researched separately and every figure cites a named GTA contractor or authority, so you can trace it. We do not scrape private data or buy reviews.

How often does EpoxyFloorIndex refresh its data?

The current EpoxyFloorIndex dataset is stamped August 2026. We refresh review data and re-run the ranking on a rolling basis so positions track current reputation, and every page shows a visible last-updated date. Between those refreshes a record can go stale. A business sold, closed or moved keeps showing its old details until the next scrape reaches it, and there is no channel open for anyone to tell us sooner.

What are the limits of EpoxyFloorIndex's rankings?

A ranking is a strong starting point, not a guarantee. The reviews are Google's, not ours, so they carry Google's own biases. EpoxyFloorIndex does not verify a contractor's WSIB coverage, liability insurance, licences or any coating warranty it advertises, and a high rank does not vouch for any single job. Always get written quotes, check insurance directly, confirm warranty terms with the contractor, and read recent reviews before you hire. EpoxyFloorIndex helps you build the shortlist; the due diligence is still yours.