How Search Ranking Works

Which professionals appear first when you search, and why. This document describes the default ordering. Sorting by something specific, or filtering, overrides it.

No placement is for sale

There is no advertising on this site, no promoted listings, and no way for a professional to pay for a better position. If that ever changes, it will be said here first and anything paid for will be labelled.

What decides the order

Six things, listed here in order of how much they currently matter. The order is published live below this document, because it is read from the running system rather than written into this text.

1. Rating. What previous learners said, adjusted so that a professional with one review is not ranked as if forty people had agreed with them.
2. Reliability. Whether their booked sessions actually happened.
3. Demonstrated demand. How many sessions they have completed, counting recent ones for more than old ones.
4. Availability. How soon they can actually be booked.
5. Response time. How quickly they usually reply to a first message.
6. Profile completeness. Whether they have filled in enough for you to make a decision.

How much each one counts is a number we do not publish, and neither are the thresholds inside them. The reason is the same one that runs through this whole rulebook: the rule changes behaviour for the better when it is known, and the exact number only helps somebody working out where to stop.

Reliability, in full

This one is worth stating completely, because knowing it is the point. A professional who has concluded enough sessions for the number to mean something, and whose no-show rate over a recent window reaches a threshold we set, is sorted after every other professional in the default order. There is no matching upward adjustment for a good record, nothing else about the ordering changes, and searching by text is unaffected.

Professionals can see their own record privately, including how far they are from the point where it starts to count, before it ever does.

Positions held for people you have not seen yet

A small number of first-page positions are reserved for professionals who have not had much exposure yet. This is a real departure from strictly best-first and we would rather you heard it from us.

It works like this: the positions are fixed, there are only a few of them, a professional is only eligible for a limited period after joining, and they must be verified and have completed at least one real session before they are eligible at all. We do not publish which positions or how many, because that would make them worth gaming.

Manual adjustment by our team

Our team can raise a professional's placement for a stated reason and a fixed period. Every grant and every withdrawal is recorded, all of them expire on their own, and none of them can be bought or requested. We would rather tell you this exists than have you find out.

Things that lower placement

• An unresolved integrity flag raised by our automated checks.
• A no-show rate at or above the threshold described above.

What is not used

Your personal browsing history is not used to reorder professionals for you, and neither is anything about you as a person.