We're Not Going to Be Vague About This
A lot of lead-scoring products treat their formula as a trade secret. Ours isn't complicated enough to hide, and you're better off pitching a lead when you understand exactly what the number means. Here's the whole thing.
The Formula
Every score is built from two inputs pulled from the business's real Google Maps listing: its star rating and its review count. Nothing else feeds into it, no guessed revenue, no "AI-estimated" traffic, no fabricated firmographic data.
Rating does 70% of the work. Review count, capped at 20, does the other 30%. In plain terms:
- Rating component = (rating ÷ 5) × 70
- Review component = (min(review count, 20) ÷ 20) × 30
- Opportunity Score = rating component + review component, rounded
A business with a 5.0 rating and 20+ reviews scores 100. A business with a 3.0 rating and 2 reviews scores in the low 40s. The cap on review count is deliberate: without it, one business with 400 reviews would swamp the comparison against one with 25, even though both have already cleared the bar of "this is a real, established business with a real reputation," which is the thing we're actually trying to measure.
Why Rating Gets 70%, Not Review Count
The ideal lead for this product isn't the business with the most reviews. It's the business that's clearly good at what it does, and simply never got a website. That's an easier sell for you, a shorter sales cycle, and a lower-risk client: someone whose reputation is already carrying them, who just needs their digital presence to catch up. A business with a mediocre rating benefits less from a new site (a site won't fix a 3.1-star reputation) and is a weaker renewal risk if you're the one building it. Rating is the closer proxy for "this business is actually good," so it carries the larger weight.
What the Tiers Mean
Every score maps to one of four tiers:
- 🔥 On-fire — 75 and up. The best combination of rating and reputation depth in the list. These are your highest-probability, fastest-close leads.
- 🌶️ Hot — 55 to 74. Strong, established businesses, still a clearly good target, just not quite at the top of the pile.
- ☀️ Warm — 35 to 54. Worth pursuing, but expect a longer conversation, either the rating or the review depth is thinner.
- ❄️ Cold — under 35. Still real, still no-website businesses, but with a thinner track record backing them up.
These thresholds aren't arbitrary; they match the tiering convention used by comparable Apify-sourced lead-scoring actors, so if you've worked with this kind of data before, the bands should feel familiar.
What This Looks Like in Real Data
Across the 9 city-and-niche combinations currently live on the site, 125 scored leads average a 74, but that average hides real spread by niche. Chicago Plumbers and Phoenix Electricians both average a 92, the strongest combos on the site right now. The two Landscapers combos, Atlanta and Charlotte, average 55, the softest. That's not a knock on landscaping as an industry, it just reflects the specific businesses that turned up in those two markets when we pulled the data: plenty of real no-website businesses, just with thinner review histories on average than the plumbers and electricians in this particular pull.
What the Score Doesn't Tell You
It's a reputation-and-depth signal, not a revenue estimate, not a "likelihood to buy a website" prediction, and not a substitute for actually looking at the business. It doesn't know the business's size, its marketing budget, or whether the owner has any interest in a website at all. Combine it with the citation-gap check (whether the business also lacks a Yelp or Facebook presence) and your own judgment about the niche before you decide who to call first.