"Reputation data" for a US service business usually means one of three different things, and the three come from sources that measure them in incompatible ways. Mixing them in one column is how a vendor-screening model ends up treating a complaint count, a star average and a paid membership as the same signal.
Three signals that all get called reputation
A rating is a grade somebody assigns: BBB assigns one to a business from its own file. A review is a customer's account of a job, usually with stars. A complaint is a formal dispute the business is asked to resolve. BBB's own developer page draws the last distinction explicitly: a review does not require the business to interact, a complaint does, and the business has the chance to respond.
Demand is a fourth signal that often gets folded in — how much work a business actually wins. Only one of the three sources below publishes it.
BBB: a grade computed without reviews
BBB's letter rating runs from A+ to F and is, in BBB's words, its opinion of how a business is likely to interact with its customers. It is built from seven elements — complaint history, type of business, time in business, transparency, failure to honour commitments to BBB, licensing and advertising issues — scored on 100 points, with 97 to 100 mapping to A+. BBB's overview states plainly that customer reviews are not used in the letter-grade calculation, and that NR ("No Rating") means not enough information rather than a bad grade.
Accreditation is separate again. It is a status a business pays BBB for, and BBB's accreditation standards require it to maintain at least a B rating. So "A+ and accredited" is two facts, one of which was bought. The BBB Scraper keeps them in separate fields — rating, is_accredited, complaints_closed_3y, reviews_total — and the BBB API question has its own guide.
Thumbtack: reviews and demand, no contact details
Thumbtack is a marketplace, so what it publishes is shaped by what a customer needs to choose a professional: a star rating and review count (96.4% of 1,603 measured professionals), num_hires — jobs booked through Thumbtack — and average response time (both 100%), and on the profile page the full review text and a 1-to-5 histogram. That is the only demand signal in this cluster.
What it does not publish is a way to reach the professional outside Thumbtack: no phone, no email. That is a property of the source, not a gap in any tool, and the Thumbtack guide covers why most of the professionals are not on the visible page either.
EnergySage: sub-ratings, contacts, and prices per place
EnergySage is narrower — solar installers only — and denser. Its reviews carry four sub-ratings (value, responsiveness, quality, service), its installer profiles carry business phone, email and website at 96.5% or more of 200 installers, and its state and city pages carry local solar cost per watt, system price and payback. Those costs are published per place, never per installer — what that means for a pricing model.
The three sources side by side
| Signal | BBB | Thumbtack | EnergySage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grade or rating | Letter grade A+ to F, not from reviews | Star average, 96.4% of 1,603 | Star average, 93.5% of 200 |
| Review text | Not collected; counts only | 88.2% of 110 profiles | 100% of 360 reviews, four sub-ratings |
| Complaints | Counts, 3 years and 12 months | None published | None published |
| Demand | None | Jobs booked, 100% | None per installer |
| Phone | 97.5% of 120 profiles | Not published | 99.0% of 200 |
| Obfuscated by BBB, not returned | Not published | 96.5% of 200 |
Every percentage carries its sample because the samples differ by an order of magnitude, and a rate from 110 rows is not the same kind of claim as one from 1,603 — why fill rates are published this way.
Each source's front page is a biased sample
The surface a person browses is not the population, and in this cluster the gap is large enough to change conclusions.
BBB. Across 1,411 search results, 96.7% were accredited and 90.8% rated A+. Across 200 profiles drawn from BBB's general profile sitemap, 0% were accredited, 47.5% were A+ and 45% were not rated. Part of that is structural — accredited businesses are published in a separate sitemap of 39 files — but the practical point stands: a dataset built from the search box describes BBB's members, not the plumbers in a town.
Thumbtack. Category pages show seven to nine professionals. Across 192 city-and-category pairs, 1,172 of 1,603 unique professionals were found only in the list "See more" loads.
EnergySage. The supplier directory holds 6,822 profiles, but only 13 of 33 sampled profiles offered installation. The installers EnergySage ranks on its location pages number 200.
The same pattern shows up outside this cluster: Nextdoor's recommendation feed looks like reviews and is half service requests — the 891-post measurement.
robots.txt and terms, source by source
All three sites restrict automated access or reuse in their terms. BBB's licenses the site for direct use "and not for sale, republication, or aggregation". Thumbtack's prohibits using robots, spiders or scrapers without its prior written consent. EnergySage's prohibits automated access other than RSS and features it provides for that purpose, without express written permission.
The robots.txt files differ in what they disallow, and each Actor touches a disallowed path:
| Source | What robots.txt disallows that matters | Which Actor route it covers |
|---|---|---|
| bbb.org | /*? (any query string), with explicit Allow for profile pages | Search mode and paginated category pages; sitemaps and profiles are allowed |
| thumbtack.com, app.thumbtack.com | /graphql, /api | The "See more" list and review pagination |
| local-data.energysage.com | / — everything | Location data and the default installer list |
This project's position on reading robots.txt as a specification is the reason the table exists: none of these three Actors should be described as robots.txt-compliant, and this cluster does not describe them that way.
Which source answers which question
"Is this vendor safe to sign with?" BBB: complaint counts, years in business, entity type and whether the business is still trading. Read the rating as BBB's opinion, not as a customer score.
"Who wins work in this trade, here?" Thumbtack: hires and response time, with review text for the why. No contact details.
"Which solar installers should we call, and what does solar cost there?" EnergySage: business contacts, licenses and certifications per installer, cost per watt per place.
"Every business in an area, whatever its reputation?" None of these three. That is a map census, and the Google Maps guide covers it.