CercaClaro's methodology: how we rank and publish

In short: we rank results with a fixed formula weighing relevance, service-area fit, verification, freshness, response time and verified reviews. Paid placement never moves that order — it lives in a separate block labelled «Sponsored». Data comes from official open datasets, public registries, professionals’ own websites and the businesses themselves. And we only build a page once enough checked professionals exist to make it worth having.

How we rank results

When you search for a service in a city, we compare the available professionals using a scoring formula. This is the system’s current design — it isn’t yet running at the full scale described here, because we’re starting with Madrid and the number of listings is still small. Once we have enough volume per city for the comparison to be statistically meaningful, the full formula kicks in there.

The six factors, with their weight in the total:

• Relevance (35%): how well the professional matches what you searched for — the exact service, not a similar one, and the terms of your query.
• Service-area fit (20%): whether the professional actually works in your city, neighbourhood or postcode, rather than just the wider region.
• Verification and completeness (15%): whether we’ve confirmed the business exists and is registered, and how many fields of the listing are filled in with real data (services, languages, area, credentials).
• Freshness (10%): when the listing was last checked or updated. A two-year-old listing scores lower than one reviewed last month.
• Response time (10%): how quickly the professional responds to quote requests and enquiries sent through CercaClaro, once we have enough lead history to measure it.
• Verified reviews (10%): ratings from real customers who hired the professional through us — never bought or imported reviews from another site.

No other factor enters this calculation. In particular, paying is not part of this formula under any circumstances.

Sponsored placements, always labelled and separate

A professional can pay to appear in a block marked «Sponsored» («Patrocinado»), visible as such before the result is shown. Three fixed rules:

1. The sponsored block never replaces or reorders the organic results — it’s a separate space, capped at one sponsored slot per six organic results.
2. A sponsored professional still has to meet the filters you applied (area, language, urgency); paying doesn’t get them shown outside those conditions.
3. The «Sponsored» label is always visible, with no hover or click needed to reveal it. That’s the same transparency requirement set out in the EU’s regulation on online intermediation platforms (Regulation (EU) 2019/1150, the “P2B Regulation”) and in Spain’s Ley de Competencia Desleal (Unfair Competition Act), which bars paid content from being mistaken for independent editorial content.

Where the data comes from

Every field on every listing carries a recorded source and date. We draw on four kinds of origin:

• Official open data: municipal business-activity censuses, health and education registries, and similar public datasets covered by Spain’s Ley 37/2007 on the reuse of public sector information — the EU/Spanish equivalent of open-data licensing. This gives us the starting point: which businesses exist, and where.
• Official registries: professional colegios (regulatory bodies), registers of licensed installers, and similar databases, used to confirm credentials (licence numbers, authorisations) one listing at a time — never by mirroring the registry wholesale.
• The professional’s own website: phone number, services, languages, service area — facts the business has already made public itself.
• The business itself: when it confirms, corrects or fills in its listing by phone, through the claim form, or when signing up.

What we don’t do: copy Google Maps or other directories, invent prices, opening hours, languages or reviews, or publish a fact without knowing where it came from. If we don’t know a price, the listing reads “Ask for a quote” instead of showing a made-up figure.

When we build a new page at all

A city-and-service page — plumbers in a specific district, say — only goes live once there’s enough data to make it genuinely useful: a minimum number of checked professionals for that area-and-category combination. Fall short of that, and the page simply doesn’t exist yet — we’d rather have no page than one that’s empty or carries two loose listings.

That means many city-and-service combinations won’t have their own page early on, and search will point you to broader results instead. As we verify more professionals — starting in Madrid — we’ll open those pages up.

How often things get updated

Professional listings are rechecked on a regular schedule: the website is re-reviewed every few months, and contact details are reverified by phone at longer intervals. If we find a business has closed or its details have changed, we flag it and correct it. Any page that can go stale — listings, guides, indicative prices — shows its last-updated date visibly, not just buried in the page’s code.

The published and last-updated dates you see on each page are real: they’re set by our own publishing schedule, never hand-set to make content look newer than it is.

If something looks wrong

If you spot a listing with a fact you think is wrong, or a page that shouldn’t exist given the data it shows, you can tell us via corrections. This methodology connects to our verification policy, our review policy and our page on sponsored content — each covers its own piece of what’s summarised here in more detail. You can also see our editorial policy and, for how the rest of the site works, the legal notice, privacy policy and cookie policy.

To explore the directory, start with services, our guides or search. Images that aren’t of a real professional are credited on credits, and the site’s accessibility statement has its own page.