About WaterproofingIndex

What this site does, and what it refuses to do

One job: put the Greater Toronto Area below-grade trade in one place and order it by something you can check. 384 businesses currently sit in 6categories, from exterior membrane work and weeping tile through sump pumps, backwater valves, crack injection and underpinning. What you will not find is a quote form, a matching service or a promise of three contractors calling you back. Those models pay the site owner per lead, and per-lead money bends a ranking. Every listing ends the same way, at the company's own phone number.

How the list is built

Business records start as public Google Maps data: name, address, phone, website, category, star rating and review count. Each record is then checked against the company's own website, because a Google category alone is not evidence that a firm does below-grade work. Companies whose sites show no waterproofing, foundation or drainage work are dropped rather than padded into the count. What survives is mapped to a Toronto neighbourhood, borough or GTA city and scored by the published formula.

Pricing is researched separately from published Ontario contractor and authority pages, and each figure is stored with the name of the source it came from.

Editorial copy on this site is AI-assisted. The descriptions, guides and explanations are drafted with AI tools on top of the scraped and checked dataset, then read and approved by the Below-Grade Records Desk before publication. Ratings, review counts and prices are never generated: they are copied from the source and shown with it.

Who maintains WaterproofingIndex?

The Below-Grade Records Desk, an independent editorial team, compiles and maintains the site. No listed company owns, funds or is affiliated with it, and no listed company has any say in where it appears. The team builds the dataset, applies the formula published on the methodology page, and reviews each dataset and price guide before it goes live. Pages are credited to the team rather than an individual, because the work is the team's and inventing a personal byline would be a decoration, not a fact.

What is in the August 2026 dataset?

384 below-grade contractors, filed under 6 kinds of work and placed across 49 Greater Toronto Area areas. Of those, 345 carry a Google rating; they average 4.9 stars, the middle one holds 47 reviews, and 84.6% sit at 4.8 or above. That last figure is the reason this site publishes no “top rated” label: at this end of the trade, a high star average separates almost nobody. Every number here is recomputed at build time, so what you read is what the ranking used.

The rules the pages are held to

Four rules decide what may be published. They are the reason a ranked list compiled without contacting a single company is worth reading at all.

• Position is never sold

  Order comes from the published formula alone. There is no paid tier, no featured slot and no advertiser to keep happy.

• Ratings stay Google's

  Every star rating and review count is public Google Maps data, reproduced as found. We do not write, buy, filter or edit reviews.

• Every price names its source

  A figure without a named Ontario contractor or authority beside it does not get published, however reasonable it sounds.

• Corrections beat consistency

  If a record is wrong, it gets fixed or pulled. A tidy dataset that misdescribes a real business is worse than a gap.

How is any of this paid for?

At the moment it is not. WaterproofingIndex earns nothing, charges homeowners nothing and charges contractors nothing. If that changes, the revenue will be labelled where a reader can see it and kept out of the ranking, and this page will say so before it happens.

Getting a listing corrected or removed

Wrong phone number, wrong category, sold business, or you would simply rather not appear? A contact address for WaterproofingIndex is not published yet. As soon as one is, it will appear on the contact page, and a correction or removal request sent to it gets the record fixed or pulled. Until then there is no channel to write to, and saying otherwise would waste your time.