How We Calculate Ratings
Every brand’s overall rating on Review Mark comes from the same open formula. Here is exactly what goes into it.
What goes into a rating
Counts as 10 reviews
Review Mark team assessment
Our team checks the brand’s products, delivery, customer service and how it handles complaints, and gives a score from 1 to 5. This gives new brands a fair starting point before many customers have reviewed them.
Each review counts as 1
Verified customer reviews
Customers rate a brand from 1 to 5 stars on its Review Mark page. Every review is checked before it is published. Fake, paid or abusive reviews are removed; genuine negative reviews are not.
Counts as 1, 3 or 5 reviews
Ratings on Google and Facebook
The brand’s public rating on other platforms, with a lower weight than our own reviews. The more reviews a platform has, the more it counts — but never more than the team assessment.
−0.2 per platform
Hidden reviews
When a brand switches off its reviews on a platform (for example Facebook), customers cannot see what others think. We show this as “Hidden by Brand” and take a small amount off the overall rating.
The formula
The overall rating is a weighted average: each part counts as a number of reviews. Then the penalty for hidden reviews is taken off and the result is rounded to one decimal.
(Team score × 10 + all customer stars + each platform’s rating × its weight)
÷ (10 + number of customer reviews + platform weights)
− 0.2 for each platform with hidden reviews
How much another platform counts
| Reviews on the platform | Counts as |
|---|---|
| 1 – 49 | 1 review |
| 50 – 999 | 3 reviews |
| 1,000 or more | 5 reviews |
| For comparison: the Review Mark team assessment | 10 reviews |
Two examples
A newer brand
No customer reviews on Review Mark yet; Facebook reviews switched off.
- Team score 3.9 × 1039
- Google 3.3 (10 reviews) × 13.3
- ÷ (10 + 1)3.8
- Facebook: Hidden by Brand−0.2
A well-known brand
Many customer reviews, and large numbers of reviews on Google and Facebook.
- Team score 4.5 × 1045
- 20 customer reviews, average 480
- Google 4.2 (16.6K reviews) × 521
- Facebook 4.6 (860 reviews) × 313.8
- ÷ (10 + 20 + 5 + 3)4.2
Example numbers only; they are not real brands.
What the labels mean
- 4.3 – 5.0Excellent
- 3.8 – 4.2Rising Brand
- 2.8 – 3.7Needs improvement
- 1.8 – 2.7Not recommended
- 1.0 – 1.7Bad
Rules that keep it fair
- Brands cannot pay to change their rating, remove genuine reviews or buy a better label.
- Ratings from other platforms only count when we know how many reviews they come from.
- Our own reviews are never counted twice, even when we show them under “Ratings across the web”.
- Other platforms’ ratings and the hidden-reviews penalty only apply once a brand has a team assessment or a customer review on Review Mark.
- The rating is worked out again whenever a review is approved or a brand’s details change.
- Star ratings shown in Google search come from Review Mark customer reviews only.
Bought from a brand recently?
Your review counts in the brand’s rating. Brands that want to know where they stand can ask for a free assessment.