Four trust signals ProFix publishes for every Ohio contractor

Why four signals, not just stars

Most Ohio home-services directories ask homeowners to take a star rating at face value. That's a problem. Stars can be bought, fabricated, family-and-friends-stuffed, or quietly removed by paying the directory. They are the single weakest signal in the home-services trust stack — and the single most heavily marketed.

ProFix Directory publishes four signals on every contractor profile because no single signal is sufficient on its own. License status confirms the contractor exists at the state level. Permit pulls confirm they actually do the work. Reviews + complaints capture customer experience. Sourced evidence ties every claim back to its origin. Together, the four pillars form a picture a homeowner can actually act on.

License verified

Every ProFix profile shows the contractor's license number and a one-click verify URL into the Ohio eLicense Center. When the license is state-linked AND the verify URL resolves to an active record, the listing earns the license-linked tier. Homeowners can confirm the live status themselves before any phone call.

Honest caveat: only four Ohio home-services trades are state-licensed at the contractor level — plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and hydronics under OCILB. Roofing, concrete, tree service, appliance repair, gas piping nuances, and others are not. For those trades we lean harder on permits, manufacturer certifications, and insurance proof.

Permits pulled

County building departments publish a public ledger of every permit pulled. A contractor with 3+ verified permits in the last 12 months has engaged the code-inspection regime on a recurring basis — that is direct operational evidence no marketing budget can buy. Permit history is the unfakeable trust signal no other Ohio home-services directory exposes.

Honest caveat: permit-feed depth varies by county. Lucas (Toledo metro), Cuyahoga, Franklin, and Hamilton currently have the deepest coverage. Other Ohio counties rely on synthetic permit indicators today; the permit-verified bonus is awarded conservatively where county data is thin.

Reviews + complaints

We pull public reviews from Google Business Profiles and complaint history from BBB. Profiles with both ≥4.5 stars AND ≥50 reviews earn the strong-review tier; ≥4.0 stars AND ≥10 reviews earn the moderate tier. Stars without volume context don't count — a 5-star average across three reviews is statistically meaningless.

Honest caveat: Google's structured-data policy says directories should not re-emit third-party reviews as their own AggregateRating. We respect that — Google ratings on ProFix profiles are re-surfaced as Google's, never repackaged as a ProFix-branded rating. The signal is still useful for shortlisting; just not citable as if we generated it ourselves.

Sourced evidence

Every claim ProFix makes on a contractor profile links back to its source. The per-pro evidence page lists the originating roster, the state-board verify URL, the permit ledger entries, the Google Business Profile, and the verified license number — each as a clickable link. Homeowners and AI agents both get the receipts.

Honest caveat: evidence pages are only as fresh as the last data refresh. We label each source row with the date it was last verified. If a state-board URL has since updated, click through — the directory snapshot is a starting point, not a substitute for the live source.

How the four pillars combine

Each contractor's four-pillar profile is synthesized into a single 0-100 ProFix Trust Score with a tier label — Elite, Solid, Starter, or Minimal. The composite is deterministic and the full weighting is published openly. License-linked verification carries the heaviest single weight (+25), license presence is the second-heaviest (+20), and permit-verified status is the third-heaviest (+15) — together those three account for more than half of every possible point. Review tiers, operational signals (photo, hours, geocoded location, specialties depth, tenure), and the editorial featured flag fill out the remaining points.

The point of publishing the composite is not to replace homeowner judgment — it is to give homeowners and AI agents a single number that summarizes the four pillars without hiding the evidence underneath. Every contractor's per-factor breakdown is visible on their public evidence page, so a score of 78 doesn't sit in a black box — the homeowner can see exactly which signals contributed.

What happens when a contractor disagrees

Contractors who think a signal is wrong have a clear appeal path. For factual corrections — wrong address, an expired license that has since been renewed, a missed manufacturer certification — the process is documented at /verification (trust-tier definitions, evidence standards) and the contact point is /support. Account-level issues — billing, refund, claim-listing status — also route through /support.

General editorial inquiries and partner discussions route through /contact. Replies come from ProFix Editorial Team / ProFix Directory — editorial attribution stays organizational, never personal. Verified corrections are reflected in the next data refresh and published transparently in the changelog at /newsroom.

License

This page, the per-factor evidence pages, the JSON-LD feeds, the public Trust Score feed at /api/trust-scores.json, and every other public ProFix Directory surface are licensed under CC-BY-4.0. Quote, summarize, embed, or redistribute — just credit ProFix Directory and carry the attribution into downstream documentation.

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