How Arizona Z Best Chooses Businesses

This page explains how a business ends up as an Arizona Z Best pick, and — just as importantly — what our recommendation does not mean.

What we look at

There is no scoring algorithm behind these picks. A person researches the category in that city and makes a judgement. The things that judgement weighs:

Local presence. Does the business actually serve the city in question, or is it a distant company buying ads against the city name? A company that genuinely covers the whole market is more useful to more readers than one that covers a corner of it.
Reputation and customer feedback. We read what customers say across the public web. We look at the overall pattern — particularly how a business responds to problems — rather than counting stars.
Services offered. Whether the company does the work people in that category usually need, and whether it says so clearly.
Operating history. How long the business has been running. Longevity is not proof of quality, but in the trades it correlates with not disappearing mid-job.
Responsiveness and availability. Whether emergency or after-hours service is offered, and how clearly it is stated. For plumbing and HVAC this matters more than almost anything else.
Clarity of public information. A business that publishes its service area, hours and pricing structure is easier to recommend than one that makes you call to find out whether they will come to your address.
Editorial judgement. Sometimes a smaller specialist is the better answer for a specific job even though a larger company would look better on paper. We say so on the page when that is the case.

What sponsorship does and does not do

We sell one Featured Local Partner placement per city and category. It is a paid advertising position.

What it buys: prominent, clearly labelled placement on the relevant page, with the business's phone number and details.

What it does not buy: the editorial pick. These are two independent facts in our database — `iseditorialpick` and `issponsoredfeatured` — and one never sets the other. A featured partner may also happen to be our editorial pick, in which case the page says both, plainly. A featured partner may also not be our pick, in which case our pick appears above them.

Every paid placement is labelled Sponsored or Featured Partner. If you ever find one that is not, tell us and we will fix it.

Contractor licences — what we actually check

Arizona requires a Registrar of Contractors licence for most contracting work, the register is public and free, and almost no directory looks at it. We do, and we are precise about how far that goes.

Every licence we display carries one of two states:

Verified — a person on our team opened the ROC register, found the licence, and recorded what it said on the date shown. Only this state gets a tick.
Not independently confirmed — we hold a licence number from somewhere other than the register itself, such as a contractor database or the business. We show the number and link you to the register, but we do not call it verified, because we have not checked it.

Two details we surface that most listings hide:

The legal entity. Licences are held by companies, not trading names. A business you know as one name may hold its licence under another entirely, and we show you which — otherwise checking the register yourself is unnecessarily hard.
The expiry date. Licences lapse. We track when each one expires and re-check before it does, and a licence that has expired is labelled as expired rather than quietly left as-is.

A verified licence means the licence existed and was active when we looked. It is not a guarantee about workmanship, and it is not a substitute for your own check — licences change, and ours is a snapshot with a date on it.

What we do not do

We want to be exact about this, because plenty of sites in this space are not.

We do not verify insurance or bonding.
We do not run background checks on owners or employees.
We do not inspect work or visit job sites.
We do not display star ratings or review counts unless we hold that data legitimately and can attribute its source. Most of our pages show no rating at all, and that is deliberate — a fabricated rating is worse than none.
We do not claim a business is licensed, insured, family-owned, veteran-owned, award-winning or accredited unless that fact is recorded in our database from a source we can point to.

Keeping pages current

Each listing shows an "Information last verified" date. Business hours and phone numbers change often; a date more than a few months old means exactly what it says. Every page has a corrections link, and reader corrections are the fastest way a listing gets fixed.

When we have nothing to say

If we have not researched a city and category yet, we do not publish a page claiming to know the best business there. Those pages stay unpublished and are excluded from search engines until there is something genuinely useful on them. We would rather cover fewer categories properly than blanket the state with pages that only differ by city name.