How we read reviews

Where the data comes from

Ratings, rating breakdowns and review text come from public Google business listings. Company statements — “licensed and insured”, a founding year, an operating number — come from each business’s own website. Nothing on this site is written by us about a specific company; every sentence about a business is either a count, a quotation, or a statement that company published itself.

We currently hold 814,419 review texts from 12,562 of the 12,651 listings we cover — 9,782 of them moving companies and the rest storage or an adjacent trade — in 953 towns and cities with a page of their own. That collection is still growing, which is why no count is written into the wording of a page — every figure you see is read from the data at the moment the page was built.

The one figure that matters most

The headline number on every listing is the share of a company’s Google ratings that are one or two stars. It is calculated as:

(one star + two star) ÷ all ratings

The denominator is Google’s own total, not the number of reviews we have read. This distinction is the single most important thing on this page. Our review sample is deliberately weighted towards the lowest-rated reviews, because those are the ones that carry information a rating cannot. If we calculated a negative rate from our own sample it would be wildly overstated for every company on the site. So we never do.

We do not publish a percentage for a business with fewer than twenty ratings. Below that, a single review moves the figure by five points or more, and a number that unstable is worse than no number.

The words we put next to that number

Each listing labels its share in plain language. Those labels are the site’s one editorial judgement about the data, so the thresholds behind them are published here rather than left for a reader to infer. They are set from the shape of the corpus — the median company sits near 3% — and not chosen to look tidy:

• Unusually few — under 2%
• Around typical — 2% up to 6%
• Above typical — 6% up to 15%
• Well above typical — 15% and over

A label describes where a company falls among the companies we hold. It is not a rating we have given it, and “well above typical” is a statement about a distribution, not an allegation about a business.

How complaint themes are counted

Moving goes wrong in a small number of recognisable ways. We match the wording of each review against the patterns below and count how many reviews describe each theme. Two rules keep this honest:

1. Complaint themes are only ever counted inside reviews the customer scored one or two stars, and praise themes only inside four and five star reviews. A theme describes what a review says. It is not a judgement we are adding on top.
2. Every pattern excludes its negated form. “Nothing was damaged” is one of the most common phrases in this entire corpus, and counting it as damage would be a straightforward falsehood. The same applies to “no hidden fees”, “never late” and the rest.

A single review often describes more than one problem, so theme counts do not add up to the number of reviews, and the percentages beside them do not add to 100.

Complaint themes

Price rose after the quote

The reviewer says the amount they were asked to pay was higher than the figure they were quoted.

Damage to belongings

The reviewer describes property arriving broken, scratched, dented or otherwise damaged.

Items missing or never delivered

The reviewer says belongings did not arrive, went missing, or were taken.

Late, delayed or a no-show

The reviewer describes the crew arriving late, not arriving, or delivery running past what was agreed.

Belongings withheld over payment

The reviewer says the load was not released until more money was paid. A named failure mode in interstate moving.

Claim or refund went nowhere

The reviewer describes trying to claim for loss or damage and being refused, ignored or underpaid.

Crew conduct

The reviewer describes rudeness, aggression, intoxication or threats from the people doing the job.

Booked by one company, moved by another

The reviewer says the company they booked was not the company that turned up. Brokering is legal and common in interstate moving, and is a frequent source of complaint.

Stopped responding

The reviewer describes calls, emails or messages going unanswered after the job or the deposit.

Praise themes

Turned up when they said

The reviewer notes the crew arriving on time or early.

Careful with belongings

The reviewer notes wrapping, padding, or that nothing was damaged.

Price matched the quote

The reviewer says the final amount matched the estimate, or came in under it.

Worked hard and fast

The reviewer notes speed, stamina or efficiency.

Kept in touch

The reviewer notes clear updates, responsiveness or being kept informed.

Professional and courteous

The reviewer describes the crew as professional, polite or friendly.

Which reviews we quote

We show up to eight low-star reviews and four high-star reviews per company. They are not the worst ones we could find: they are chosen to cover as many different themes as possible, so that the set describes as many distinct problems as the reviews we hold allow rather than the same complaint eight times. Where the business has replied, the reply is shown directly underneath.

Quotations are reproduced as written, apart from three changes: reviewer names are shortened to a first name and an initial, e-mail addresses and phone numbers are removed, and very long reviews are cut at a sentence boundary. We do not correct spelling or tidy the wording.

What we do not claim

• We do not verify licences or insurance. Where a company says on its own website that it is licensed, bonded or insured, we show that it says so and quote the text. That is a claim by the business, and we never mark it with a checkmark or any other symbol implying somebody checked it.
• We do not confirm operating authority. Where a USDOT or MC number appears in a company’s own website copy we reproduce it and link to the public federal register, so you can look it up yourself. We do not check whether it is current or whether it belongs to that business.
• We do not rank, score or recommend. There is no MoverCompass rating. Lists can be sorted by the figures, and the figures are Google’s.
• Missing is not zero. Where we have not collected a rating breakdown, or we have not read any reviews, the page says so. A company we know little about is an unknown quantity, and it never gets to look like a clean record.

Where this method is weak

• Reviews are self-selected. People who had an unremarkable move mostly do not write about it, so review text over-represents both ends of the experience.
• Pattern matching is not comprehension. A review that describes damage in unusual wording will be missed, and an unusual sentence can be matched wrongly. Counts are a useful shape, not an exact measurement.
• Google’s own review filtering happens before we ever see a listing, and we cannot see what it removed.
• Local moves and long-distance moves are genuinely different businesses with different failure modes, and the data does not carry a reliable marker for which a company does. We do not guess.
• A business can be listed more than once on Google, or under a name it no longer trades as. Where we can tell, we list what Google lists.

Corrections

If you run a moving company and something on your listing is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. The route and what we can and cannot change are set out on the page for movers.