How WaterproofingIndex ranks companies

The formula

Each company carries one WaterproofingIndex Score out of 100, added up from three pillars. The calculation is deterministic, so identical data always produces an identical order, and anyone can audit a position among the 384listings. Every profile page prints its own company's score broken down line by line, with the sentence behind each line.

Why the star rating is adjusted first

A perfect rating on a handful of reviews carries almost no information, and on this site that is not a small problem: 200 of the 384 companies listed hold exactly 5.0 stars. On a page of fifteen, the raw star rating separates almost nobody. The fix is to treat every company as though it opened with 10 imaginary reviews sitting at the dataset mean of 4.85 stars, then let its real reviews pull the score away from that. A company with hundreds of reviews barely feels the prior. A company with four feels it heavily, until it earns more history. The other two pillars exist for the same reason: once the stars have run out of things to say, something else has to do the separating.

This shrinkage approach is the same idea behind IMDb's Top 250 and similar rankings. In practice it means a long record at 4.8 stars finishes above an untested 5.0, which is the order most homeowners would choose anyway when hiring for work that has to hold back water for decades.

What a company says about itself, and why it counts for 35

Every company's own website was fetched once on August 31, 2026and read for a fixed set of statements. Nothing was inferred. A statement counts only if the page actually contains a sentence making it, and that sentence is stored alongside it and printed on the company's profile, so you can read what it actually said rather than take our word for the summary.

This pillar is worth more here than the reputation gap alone would suggest, and that is deliberate. In a trade with no licence, what a company chooses to state about its insurance and its WSIB coverage is the only credential-shaped thing there is. WSIB is worth 5 rather than 4for the same reason: a WSIB clearance number is something you can check yourself, free, in a minute, which a claim of being “licensed” in this trade is not.

One thing this deliberately does notscore: a page telling you to go and check a contractor's licensing yourself. That sentence exists on real websites in this directory, and it is advice to a reader, not a claim by a business. Counting it would have this site reading a warning as a credential.

The record, worth 25

Observations about how complete and reachable a listing is, plus the themes that keep recurring across the Google reviews already stored on the record. Those themes are matched against a fixed list, each one carries the reviewer's own words, and a company with fewer than three stored reviews gets none at all rather than a theme drawn from one person's afternoon.

Complaints count too, at 3 points off each, down to a floor of 6. If they did not, this score would read the good half of a record and ignore the bad half.

A website that turned our reader away still scores 8 of 10, almost the full award, and that is on purpose. A bot block, a browser challenge or a slow response is not evidence a company has gone: a person with a browser is very likely served the page normally. Only a domain that genuinely does not answer at all drops to 2: a name that will not resolve, a refused connection, a server error, a missing page. Nothing here removes, hides or filters a company from any list. A lapsed domain is a lapsed domain, not a closed business.

A worked example

Two made-up companies, scored against the live August 2026 dataset mean of 4.85 stars. A holds a perfect rating on 8 reviews; its website answered but says nothing about insurance or WSIB, names no trade body, gives no founding year. B holds 4.8 stars over 280 reviews and says it is insured and WSIB-covered, and says it has been going since 1998. The review column is produced by the same function the ranking runs; the other two are the point tables above, added up.

B finishes first, 82 against 44. The perfect 5.0 shrinks toward the mean on only 8 reviews, and B's volume, the statements on its own website and its fuller record carry it past. Note where the gap actually opens: pillar A separates them by 6.4 points, and the other two pillars by 32. That is the point of the change: a directory where two thirds of companies show five stars needs something other than stars to sort on.

What gets dropped or pushed to the bottom

Businesses that have closed are not screened out, and this page used to say they were removed outright. The records behind this site were collected in August 2026and the export carries no closed-or-open field, so nothing has ever been dropped for being closed. If your basement is flooding, check the company's own Google record before you phone. Nothing is filtered out or hidden: a company with a thin review record or an unreachable website keeps its profile page and its place in every list, it simply scores lower, and its page shows you exactly which points it did not collect and why.

Every web address on this site was fetched on August 26, 2026. 22 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.

Where the inputs come from

Ratings, review counts and business details are read from public Google Maps profiles, then each record is checked against the company's own website for the services it actually offers, its photos and its contact details. Pricing across 6 categories is researched separately, and each figure is published with the name of the Ontario contractor or authority it came from so you can trace it. Nothing private is scraped and no reviews are bought.

How often the numbers move

The current dataset is stamped August 2026. Review counts and ratings are re-pulled and the ranking re-run on a rolling basis, so a position tracks reputation rather than freezing on the day a company was first indexed, and each page shows its own last-updated date. If a business has been sold, has closed or has details that are wrong, tell us through the contact page and the record is updated between refreshes.

What a high rank does not tell you

It tells you a company has a strong public review record and a complete one. It tells you nothing about the crew that will show up at your house. This site does not check WSIB coverage, liability insurance, licences or workmanship guarantees, and it has never inspected a job. For work that involves excavating beside a foundation or cutting a slab, ask for proof of insurance in writing, get the scope itemised by more than one company, and read the recent reviews rather than the average. The shortlist is ours. The decision stays yours.