Best HVAC Companies is a free directory of HVAC contractors and supply stores. Listing a business is free. We earn money by selling optional featured placements to businesses that want more visibility. This page explains what that means for you.
How paid placements are labelled
- Any business that pays for placement carries a Sponsoredlabel wherever that placement appears — on its listing card, its profile page and in our newsletter.
- Links from a sponsored listing to the business’s own website are marked as sponsored links for search engines.
- We never present a paid placement as an editorial recommendation.
What payment does not change
Paying for placement never changes a business’s rating, its review counts, its review summary, or whether it is marked as verified. Businesses cannot pay to remove or edit reviews.
How “Editor’s #1” companies are chosen
The “Editor’s #1” companies on our home and hub pages are chosen by our own criteria, never for payment: in each featured state we show the company with the highest ranking score (explained below), using review count as the tie-breaker. A business cannot buy this badge.
Where ratings come from
The ratings on each listing are the business’s own public ratings on Google, Yelp, Angi and HomeAdvisor, shown with the name of each platform. Business details — services, address, phone and licence — are checked against the business’s own website. Visitor reviews left on this site are moderated before they are published.
How the rating and the ranking are calculated
- A listing’s headline rating is the average of its platform ratings, each weighted by that platform’s number of reviews. A rating from 400 Google reviews counts for far more than one from a single review elsewhere.
- The BBB value is an accreditation grade, not a customer rating, so it is shown separately and is not part of the average.
- Lists are ordered by that rating adjusted for how many reviews stand behind it, so a perfect score from two reviews does not outrank a slightly lower score from hundreds. Companies with no public rating are listed after rated ones.
- Paid placements appear in their own labelled “Sponsored” area and never change this order.
Questions
If you think a listing is labelled incorrectly, contact us. Businesses interested in a featured placement can see the options on our Advertise page.