How rankings & sponsorship work

Ordering

Category listings are shown in bands: sponsored businesses first (clearly labeled), then verified businesses, then everyone else. Within each band, listings we are most confident are accurate come first. If you search by ZIP, listings closest to that ZIP come first within each band. Paid placement changes order. It never changes verification status.

The labels you will see:SponsoredVerified

Sponsored disclosure

Sponsored placements are always labeled “Sponsored.” Paying does not buy a verified badge or a claim of being objectively best.

How we count

A business counts toward a city or category total when its listing is published, it is filed under that category, and it has a street address or a service area in that city. Listings that are drafts, awaiting review, suspended, closed, archived or merged as duplicates are not counted. A business filed under two categories counts once in the city total and once in each category.

Counts are taken from the live directory and retaken once they are more than 15 minutes old. The date next to a count is the day it was taken. ZIP counts use the first five digits of each listing’s postal code.

Listings come from Overture Maps Foundation places data (release 2026-08-19.0, CDLA-Permissive-2.0), which includes Foursquare OS Places (Apache-2.0), and from businesses added or updated through SiteCity by their owners and our staff.

Indexing

We only let search engines index pages that meet quality and density thresholds; thin or empty pages are kept out of the index.

Reviews & third-party content

SiteCity does not host its own reviews. Where we reference third-party sources, we link out and attribute them rather than copying their content.