What buyers actually verify, industry by industry.

The underlying question is identical — can this business be relied on — but the evidence that answers it changes completely by trade. A roofing customer checks contractor licensing and whether the company is genuinely local, because storm-chasing crews are the category's known failure mode. A cleaning customer checks bonding and background screening, because theft from an unattended home is the specific fear. An auto repair customer wants replaced parts returned, because they cannot verify whether a repair was necessary. Vettify weights the same scoring categories for every business but applies industry-specific expectations within them.

Categories that combine high ticket price, urgency, and information asymmetry produce the most trust failure: solar installation, roofing, moving, and auto repair lead consistently. Solar sells twenty-five-year warranties from companies that often do not last five years. Roofing attracts transient storm crews. Interstate moving has a well-documented hostage-load problem. Auto repair asks customers to authorize work they cannot independently evaluate. In each case the structural conditions, not the individual operators, create the trust gap.

Four checks cover most categories. Verify the license on the state board's own website rather than trusting a number printed on a site. Confirm the address resolves to a real, mappable location rather than a mailbox store. Confirm liability insurance and, where the business enters your home unattended, bonding. Then read reviews for recency and pattern rather than average, because a burst of five-star ratings in a single week is a stronger warning than a mediocre score accumulated over years.

Most established small businesses land between 50 and 75. Above 80 generally requires verifiable licensing, a real physical address, published pricing or fee structure, warranty and contract terms available in writing, and a multi-year review history across more than one platform. Scores below 45 usually reflect missing verifiable licensing, a very new or thin web presence, or review patterns that suggest solicitation rather than organic accumulation. Good businesses frequently score low purely because none of their evidence is published anywhere.

Because trust scoring measures published verifiable evidence, not quality. A superb plumber with twenty years of local reputation, no website pricing, no license number online, and a slow mobile site will score below a mediocre competitor who publishes all three. That is not a flaw in the measurement — it reflects what a first-time customer can actually see. The remedy is disclosure: nearly every low-scoring competent business can move up substantially by publishing information it already has.