Ratings tab: network-wide peer ratings and Verinode scores

What the Ratings tab is

The Ratings tab is the vendor, process, and equipment intelligence layer inside Verinode HQ's Benchmarks hub. It shows how the whole Verinode network of operators, not just your own franchisees, rates the vendors, subcontractors, carriers, TPAs, restoration processes, and equipment they use, alongside the Verinode Research Score computed independently from public and research-layer signals. It is the same Ratings tab every individual operator sees on their own Verinode IQ, mounted for your leadership team in network mode.

This is not a directory of your franchisees' vendor contracts, and it is not a place to see which office uses which vendor. It is a market-wide read: which software, services, equipment brands, and processes the broader restoration industry rates well, rates poorly, or hasn't rated at all yet, plus the independent Verinode Score wherever one has been computed. Your own network's cost-structure and vendor-spend numbers, if you want those, live on the Benchmarks tab, not here. See Network benchmarks: how the section works.

Verinode HQ never decides which vendor to use. It surfaces what the network has rated and scored; your leadership team reads it and decides.

Where to find it

Open Benchmarks from the HQ sidebar at hq.verinode.ai/benchmarks, then tap the Ratings pill in the tab bar at the top of the page:

Benchmarks · Carriers & TPAs · Materials · Industry Data · Ratings · Analyst Reports · Industry News

The tab's header subtitle reads: "Peer reviews + Verinode Research Score on every rate-able entity." Below that, the tab opens on its own landing gallery, not a long scroll, described below.

The three signals this tab joins

Every rate-able entity on this tab can carry up to three distinct signals, and the tab is built to show all three side by side wherever they exist:

• Verinode Score. An independent composite, 1.0 to 10.0, computed by Verinode's scoring engine from public and research-layer signals: market trust, peer intelligence, cost position, integration and ecosystem depth, switching cost, AI and innovation, risk and compliance, and more, weighted by category. It comes with a one-word label, Strong, Solid, Mixed, or Weak, and is never derived from any single operator's private rating. See The Verinode Score on vendors and entities for the full breakdown of how it's built.
• Peer Rating. The running average of individual operators' own satisfaction ratings of a vendor, process, or equipment item, anonymized and pooled across the network. A peer rating only appears once enough distinct operators nationally have rated the same entity, below that the entity simply doesn't show a peer number yet, the same cohort-forming floor every other benchmark on the platform uses. Verinode never lowers that floor to make a list look fuller, and never states the exact number of contributors behind a given rating.
• Team Rating. An individual operator's own team's internal rating of a vendor in their own stack. This is a private, single-operator signal. On HQ, every Team Rating cell reads "Not rated." There is no operator team behind a group account, so this column is always empty on the network read, it's there for layout parity with the operator's own IQ view, not because HQ is missing data.

A vendor doesn't need all three to appear on this tab. A vendor with a Verinode Score but no peer ratings yet still shows up, scored and unrated. A vendor with peer ratings but no computed score yet still shows up, rated and unscored. The tab is built to surface whatever intelligence exists, not to wait for every signal to be complete.

The landing gallery: five entity types

The tab opens on a gallery of large photo tiles, one per entity type, each showing a count and its unit noun:

• Software: operator-facing SaaS tools (estimating, project management, CRM, and similar), counted in vendors.
• Services: subcontractors, professional services, insurance, supplies, and other non-software vendor categories, counted in vendors.
• Clients: carriers and TPAs, counted in organizations.
• Equipment: physical gear: air movers, dehumidifiers, HEPA units, generators, and other restoration equipment products, counted in products.
• Processes: documented restoration workflows (water damage, mold, fire and smoke, and so on), counted in processes.

Each tile's count is a dedupe across every source that knows about that entity, peer-rated, Verinode-scored, and catalog, by canonical entity ID, so a vendor that's only in the research catalog and hasn't been rated by anyone yet still counts toward the tile. Tap a tile to drill in.

Drilling into Software or Services

Tapping Software or Services opens a second gallery: category tiles (e.g. Estimating Software, Project Management, Business Coaching & Consulting), each showing a count and, where applicable, a "N rated · N scored" line instead of a plain count, so you can tell at a glance whether a category has real intelligence behind it or is still catalog-only.

Tap a category tile to open the category's rating table. At this level, a Table / Market Map toggle appears whenever the category has vendors with both Product Capability and Restoration Position scored (the two axes the Market Map needs).

Table view

A dense table, one row per vendor, columns left to right:

• Vendor: logo (resolved from the vendor's own site favicon, falling back to initials) and name. If any franchise-level carrier program has classified the vendor, a colored chip would normally show next to the name reading "Required by N," "Preferred by N," "Approved by N," or "Blocked by N." On HQ this chip never appears: carrier-program approval data is operator-scoped and isn't part of the network read.
• Verinode Score: the score out of 10 and its label (Strong / Solid / Mixed / Weak), or a dash if the vendor hasn't been scored.
• Peer Rating: the rating out of 5 (vendor and equipment ratings) or out of 100 (process LEAN scores), with the sample size shown as "n=N peers," or a dash if it hasn't cleared the cohort floor yet.
• Team Rating: always "Not rated" on HQ.

Rows are sorted with scored-or-rated vendors first (Verinode Score descending, then Peer Rating descending), and catalog-only vendors that have neither signal yet trailing alphabetically at the bottom, shown at reduced opacity. Tapping a row opens the fullest drill available: the Verinode Score deep-dive if the vendor has one, otherwise the Peer Rating deep-dive.

A checkbox at the left of each rated or scored row lets you multi-select up to 4 vendors. Once 2 or more are checked, a Compare bar appears pinned near the bottom of the screen; tapping it opens a side-by-side comparison of the selected vendors' three rating signals.

Market Map view

A scatter plot titled "Product Capability × Restoration Position," plotting up to 40 scored vendors as circular logo bubbles on two axes, both running low (left/bottom) to high (right/top), centered on the score midpoint of 3.0:

• Product Capability (horizontal axis): how deep the vendor's feature set is.
• Restoration Position (vertical axis): how well-suited to restoration work specifically the vendor is, versus a generic tool serving the same job.

The plot is split into four labeled quadrants: Industry Leaders (top right, strong on both axes), Specialists (top left, strong on Restoration Position, lighter on Product Capability), Capable Outsiders (bottom right, strong feature depth, weaker restoration fit), and Emerging (bottom left, both still developing). A legend below the chart keys each bubble's colored ring to its score label (Strong / Solid / Mixed / Weak). Tapping a bubble opens that vendor's Verinode Score deep-dive. If fewer than 40 vendors in the category have both axes scored, a line at the top reads how many of the category's vendors are actually plotted ("N of M vendors (scored)"). If none are plotted yet, the panel reads: "Not enough scored dimensions yet to place these vendors on the map. Switch to the table view to see the cohort."

Drilling into Clients (Carriers & TPAs)

Tapping Clients opens two sub-tiles: Carriers and TPAs. Tapping either opens a table with these columns:

• Name: logo, name, and a subtitle line when the catalog carries one.
• Trust Score: the research-composite trust score out of 10 (with its label, e.g. "8.2 Strong"), or a dash if ungraded.
• Peer Rating: the operator satisfaction average out of 5, with sample size shown as "n=N," or "Not yet rated" if it hasn't cleared the cohort floor.
• Days to Pay: the typical days between a job being billed and payment landing, or a dash.
• Approval: the typical estimate/supplement approval rate as a percentage, or a dash.

Tapping a row opens the full client drill-down (the same one the Carriers & TPAs tab uses). This is a different data shape from vendors: carriers and TPAs are counterparties, not products your network buys, so there's no Team Rating column and no inline rate action anywhere in this view, on IQ or HQ.

Drilling into Equipment

Tapping Equipment opens category tiles by equipment class (Air Movers, Dehumidifiers, HEPA Units, Generators, and so on). Until enough operators nationally have rated products in a given equipment category (product_satisfaction ratings clearing the cohort floor), the tab falls back to browsing the equipment research catalog directly: a table per category listing each product's name, manufacturer, and Verinode Research Score where one has been computed. Once peer ratings for that category clear the floor, the same Software/Services-style rated table takes over automatically, no separate navigation.

Drilling into Processes

Tapping Processes opens category tiles by process family (Water Damage, Mold Remediation, Fire & Smoke, and so on), each tile showing a "N scored" count against the category's Verinode Research Score coverage. The same fallback pattern applies here: until peer LEAN-score ratings clear the cohort floor for a category, the drill shows the process research catalog directly, a table listing each process's name, its governing IICRC standard (S500, S520, S770, or a dash if none applies), and its Verinode Research Score where computed.

Once peer ratings clear the floor, the category's table becomes a full rating table instead: Name, Category, Score (out of 100, the LEAN score), a compact Distribution bar showing the cohort's middle 50% with the process's own score marked, and Ratings (sample size). Tapping a row opens the Peer Rating deep-dive, which can also break the score into per-framework sub-scores (IICRC S500, S520, S770, OSHA) when at least a few operators have contributed a rating tagged to that specific framework.

What the deep-dive panels show

Tapping any rated or scored entity opens a full-screen slider. You can swipe or use the arrow keys to move to the next or previous entity in the same list without closing the panel.

• Verinode Score deep-dive: the score out of 10, its label, a confidence marker (Verified, Assessed, Estimated, or Directional, reflecting how much evidence backs the number), a density percentage (how complete the underlying data is), and when the score was last computed. Below that: a sparkline of the last several recomputes, a per-dimension breakdown (Market Trust, Peer Intelligence, Cost Position, Integration & Ecosystem, Switching Cost, AI & Innovation, Risk & Compliance, Industry Alignment, Operational Fit, Vendor Trajectory, ESG, Feature Depth, whichever apply to that vendor's category) each shown with its own score, confidence, and weight in the composite, and the category's overall weight profile so you can see which dimensions matter most for that kind of vendor. A section for the operator's own team rating on this vendor is part of the same panel on IQ; HQ never has an operator team rating to show, so that section is simply absent.
• Peer Rating deep-dive: the overall score, sample size, an approximated cohort distribution (middle-50% band plus median, built from the running mean and variance rather than raw individual ratings, which are never exposed), a plain-language methodology note describing exactly how that entity type's rating is collected and anonymized, and a list of related entities in the same category to jump to next.

Reading the category tiles

Every L2 category tile (Software, Services, Equipment, Processes) shows either a plain count ("N vendors," "N processes") or, once the category has real rated/scored intelligence, a "N rated · N scored" line instead. "Rated" counts entities with a peer rating; "scored" counts entities with a Verinode Score. A vendor with both counts in both.

Empty states

If nothing anywhere in the network has cleared the cohort floor or been scored, the whole Ratings tab reads:

No rated entities have cleared cohort minimums yet. Items appear here once 3+ operators have rated the same vendor / process / equipment item, or once a vendor's data passes the Verinode Research Score density threshold.

More specific empty states appear at each level as you drill in:

• An entity type with no categories yet reads "No categories yet for [type]."
• A category with nothing in it reads "No items in this category."
• The Clients sub-tiles read "No carriers in the catalog yet" or "No TPAs in the catalog yet" when empty.
• The Processes catalog fallback reads "No processes in the catalog yet," and a selected process category with nothing in it reads "No processes in this category."
• The Market Map reads its own explanatory empty state (above) when no vendors in the category have both scored axes yet.

None of these are errors. They mean the network hasn't accumulated enough contributing data at that level yet, not that something is broken.

What HQ specifically does not see here

Because this is the network-wide intelligence layer, not a franchisee-facing view, a few things an individual operator sees on their own IQ are deliberately absent on HQ:

• No inline rate action. The star-picker that lets an operator rate a vendor directly from the table doesn't render for HQ; every unrated Team Rating cell simply reads "Not rated."
• No carrier-program approval chips. The "Required by / Preferred by / Approved by / Blocked by" pill that reflects an individual operator's carrier program classifications for a vendor never appears on HQ rows.
• No stack-gap hypotheses. On an operator's own IQ, the Ratings landing page can show a "Stack Analysis" card surfacing categories where operators with a given vendor type outperform operators without one. That card only speaks to a single operator's own stack composition and never renders on HQ.

None of this is missing data, it reflects that HQ's Ratings tab is a market read across the whole network, not a single business's private stack.

Related articles

• Network benchmarks: how the section works
• What HQ sees: the network privacy boundary
• The Verinode Score on vendors and entities
• Network health