Ranking Methodology
Wadline publishes two different orderings, and they are produced in different ways. This page describes both, with the arithmetic, so any position on the site can be checked against the data behind it.
The Leader Matrix
The matrix at the bottom of every category listing plots each company on two axes. Neither axis can be bought. Paid placement exists on Wadline, it appears in the listing above, and it is labelled there — but it contributes nothing to a position on this chart.
Horizontal — Focus. How concentrated a company is on the category you are looking at. It is the inverse of how many categories the company claims in total, blended with the share of its portfolio tagged with this one (weighted 40% claimed, 60% delivered). A firm listing three technologies is concentrated; a firm listing forty appears in forty listings and is a generalist in each.
Vertical — Proven delivery. The sum of four capped components:
- published client reviews, 2 points each, to a maximum of 40;
- portfolio projects, 1.2 points each, to a maximum of 30;
- Ahrefs Domain Rating, 0.33 points per point, to a maximum of 20;
- years listed on Wadline, 1 point per year, to a maximum of 10.
Every component is capped so that no single signal can carry a company to the top, and each cap sits where the underlying data stops being informative.
Who is plotted. Only companies with at least two of those four components present. A company with one signal would be a dot at a position we had guessed, so it is left off, and each chart states how many companies it plotted out of how many it listed.
What is deliberately excluded, and why:
- The star rating. Historically every stored rating sat between 8.80 and 9.98 — it separated nobody. Ratings are now computed from published reviews, but a company still needs reviews before a score is shown at all.
- Editorial rank. A hand-assigned sort weight with 35 distinct values across 3,469 companies. It orders the listing; it does not belong on a chart that claims to measure delivery.
- Paid verification. A purchase, not evidence.
Listing order
The order of the cards above the matrix is a different thing, and it does include what companies pay for. In order: companies boosted in this exact service-and-location combination with an active subscription; then subscription tier; then, among equals, a seed that reshuffles daily so exposure rotates; then a quality score built from editorial rank, published reviews, the review-backed rating, delivered projects and paid verification.
Paid verification is worth about five rank points inside that score — enough to lift a company past an otherwise equal competitor, not enough to lift an empty profile above companies with a real record. That limit exists because the previous ordering did the opposite.
Market data
The pricing table and the budget figures on category pages are aggregates of what companies publish on their own profiles: minimum project budgets and hourly rates. Rules applied to all of them:
- USD only — companies quote in six currencies and averaging across them produces a number nobody charges;
- budgets outside $300–$2,000,000 and rates outside $5–$500/hr are discarded as data-entry errors;
- medians, never averages;
- a country needs at least 5 listed companies before it gets a row, and 5 published rates before a median rate is shown;
- where a sample is too small, the figure is not shown at all.
These are the floors below which companies decline work — not the price of a finished project. Wadline does not publish an estimate of what any particular scope should cost, because that number cannot be derived from this data.
Sources
Everything above is computed from the live Wadline database and recalculated on each request. Ahrefs Domain Rating is an external signal refreshed periodically. Reviews are moderated before publication.