The Reputation Index is a 0–100 composite we calculate ourselves. It is not an official rating from any app store, Google, or the companies themselves — it’s our attempt to turn public, verifiable signals into one comparable number. Here is exactly how it’s built, and where it falls short.
1. Store ratings (80% of the score). We take each provider’s official aggregate rating from the App Store, Google Play, and Google Maps — the real headline numbers those platforms publish, across every rating they’ve received, not just the handful of written reviews we display. We average the ratings a provider has, then stretch the scale so the differences actually show: a 3.0★ average maps to 0 and a 5.0★ average to 100. (Without stretching, every 4-plus-star app would bunch up in the 80s and 90s and look identical.)
2. Community sentiment (20% of the score). We scrape what dental hygienists say about each provider on Reddit and in public Facebook groups, and classify each mention as positive, negative, or neutral. The score reflects the share of positive vs. negative mentions. Because a brand with only a couple of mentions shouldn’t swing to 0 or 100 on a tiny sample, we pull small samples gently toward a neutral midpoint.
We blend the two — 80% store ratings, 20% community sentiment — because ratings come from far more people and are the steadier signal. A provider that has only one of the two (e.g. an agency with Google reviews but no app, or an app with no social chatter yet) is scored on whatever it has.
Agencies are capped at 75. Traditional recruiting and placement agencies aren’t app-based, self-serve platforms, so we don’t let them rank at the very top against the consumer apps. This is an editorial choice, and we’re telling you so.
Ratings: the App Store (Apple), Google Play, and Google Maps. Mentions: public posts on Reddit and dental-hygienist Facebook groups. Store ratings refresh weekly; the social corpus is curated and updated on demand. Everything we show links back to its original source so you can check it yourself.
It’s a directional, comparative read, not a verdict. Reviews and mentions are a sample, not every opinion ever posted. The exact weights (80/20), the rating stretch, and the agency cap are our judgment calls — reasonable people could choose differently.
For full transparency: the Index formula above is applied identically to every brand— there is no thumb on the scale for the score itself. The written editorial summaries, on the other hand, are openly opinionated. The numbers are even-handed; the commentary is not, and we’d rather be upfront about that than pretend otherwise.