A tradie’s position in a customer’s results is decided by seven factors, none of which is money. There is no paid placement, no promoted slot, and no advertising position. The order comes from how well each tradie fits that particular job.
The seven factors, and what each is worth
Every job produces its own ordering. These are the inputs and their relative weights:
- Distance — 30. The heaviest factor, and it is measured against the tradie’s own stated radius rather than in absolute kilometres. Thirty kilometres is nothing to a regional operator who works across 150, and a long way for a suburban one who works across 15. Using absolute distance would punish honesty about reach.
- Specialty fit — 25. Not just the trade, but whether they do this kind of work within it.
- Response rate — 15. Whether they answer when asked.
- Rating — 12. Deliberately capped, so reputation cannot become a moat that no newcomer can cross.
- Availability confidence — 10. Whether their calendar can be trusted. More on this below.
- Job history — 5. Saturates at around twenty jobs, again so it cannot become a moat.
- Profile completeness — 3.
Why unknowns score as neutral, not zero
A tradie who has just joined has no ratings and no response history. Scoring those as zero would mean no new tradie ever gets a first job, and a marketplace where supply cannot grow is a marketplace that dies quietly.
So an unknown scores neutral. Ratings use a prior that starts everyone at a reasonable assumption and moves as real reviews arrive.
Why a tradie is never marked down for our failures
Response rate only counts a job the platform can prove reached the tradie’s phone. If a notification was never delivered, it is excluded from the calculation entirely rather than counted as an unanswered job.
The alternative would be to invent a penalty for a tradie whose phone we failed to reach, and then use it to push them down the results. That is a fabricated signal presented as a measurement, and it would be worse than having no signal at all.
Can a tradie pay to appear higher?
No. There is no paid ranking factor, and the codebase carries an automated test that fails if one is ever added. It is checked on every change.
Why the reasons are shown to the customer
Each tradie in a customer’s list carries the reasons they were ranked where they were, and the breakdown is stored with the job. That means “why did this tradie come third?” is still answerable weeks later.
A ranking nobody can interrogate is a ranking nobody should trust.