How we rank
Top5.nz ranks New Zealand businesses using public data only. Rankings are determined by the data, not by payment.
Data source
Rankings are derived from publicly available business ratings and customer reviews. We collect this data on a rolling cycle and recalculate scores on each update.
How scoring works
Each business is scored automatically from six signals. Rating carries the most weight, tempered by how much evidence sits behind it.
- Star rating and confidence
- Rating is weighted most heavily, but only carries full weight once a business has built a meaningful review count. A 5.0 from 3 reviews is treated more sceptically than a 4.8 from 80.
- Review volume
- Volume counts, but on a logarithmic scale, so a business with 500 reviews does not simply steamroll one with 100.
- Proportion of 1-star reviews
- A disproportionate share of 1-star reviews applies a compounding penalty that grows sharply as the proportion rises. The penalty eases as those reviews age, so a business that has since turned things around is not punished forever.
- Review velocity
- Steady, recent reviews score higher than a large total that peaked years ago. This rewards businesses actively earning new feedback.
- Free identity verification
- A small trust bonus (+3 points) goes to businesses that complete free identity verification, confirming a real operator stands behind the listing. Verification is free and open to any business, so it is not pay-to-rank: it rewards accountability, not spend.
What counts
- Google star rating
- Rating confidence (weighted by review count)
- Total review count
- Proportion of 1-star reviews
- Review velocity (recent growth rate)
- Free identity verification (small trust bonus)
What doesn't count
- Advertising or payments
- Manual editorial picks
Listing tiers
The five highest-scoring businesses for this category and city. Purely merit-based and unpurchasable.
Positions 6–10 by score. Merit-based.
Why a business might not appear
A page only lists businesses that actually do that kind of work. Many firms offer several services, so a business can be a genuine local name and still not belong on a specific list. We leave a business off a category page when two things are both true: its Google Business Profile does not list that category, and none of its customer reviews describe that type of work.
Both conditions have to fail before a business is left off. If a business lists the category on its profile, it stays on the page even when reviewers have not written about that particular service. This is deliberate, since plenty of good businesses have customers who praise the result without naming the job. Where a business has only a handful of reviews we make no judgement at all, because there is not enough to go on.
Nothing here is permanent. A business returns to the page automatically once its profile lists the category or its reviews start describing that work.
Update frequency
Rankings are refreshed on a rolling daily cycle. Each category and city is updated regularly throughout the year, giving the data enough time to reflect genuine shifts in customer satisfaction rather than reacting to individual review spikes.
Editorial independence
No business can pay to influence its score, and no business is moved up or down by hand. The same scoring model runs across every category and location, and each ranking is published without manual adjustment.
This makes our rankings reproducible: given the same public inputs and the same scoring version, the system produces the same result. Each ranking is a dated snapshot of public data scored against a fixed model.
For businesses
Your position is earned from public ratings and reviews, so there is no shortcut: the way to rank higher is to genuinely satisfy more customers. You can see exactly where you currently stand, and read our practical guidance on improving your position, on the pages below.