How we rank Rochester window cleaning companies

Every business in our directory gets a single composite score — the Roc Score — built from seven weighted factors, not a raw star average. That distinction matters more in window cleaning than in most local-service categories: this is a seasonal, route-based trade where a spring rush can produce a burst of reviews in six weeks, and a raw average would let a brand-new pop-up crew with five five-star reviews outrank an operator who has run the same Rochester route since 2008.

The formula

score = (w1·ratingG + w2·countG + w3·ratingY + w4·countY
          + w5·bbb + w6·recency + w7·overlap) × 100

Formula version: 2026-05-16-v1

  w1 = 0.30  Google rating (0–5 stars, normalized 0–1)
  w2 = 0.20  Google review volume (log-scaled, not linear)
  w3 = 0.10  Yelp rating
  w4 = 0.10  Yelp review volume (log-scaled)
  w5 = 0.05  BBB accreditation (1 if accredited, 0 if not)
  w6 = 0.10  Review recency (freshest review ≤30/90/365 days)
  w7 = 0.15  Overlap with our 10 target Rochester-area suburbs

Google rating carries the largest single weight (30%) because it's still where most Rochester homeowners actually book from. Review volume(w2, w4) is log-scaled rather than counted straight — a two-person crew running a spring/fall route can add 40-plus reviews in a six-week window, while a specialist doing careful hand-detail work on Brighton's divided-light windows might add five in the same span. A log curve keeps the gap between 0 and 50 reviews meaningful while flattening the gap between 200 and 500, so raw hustle doesn't drown out consistency.

BBB accreditation gets a deliberately small weight (5%) because it's genuinely uncommon in residential window cleaning — only a handful of operators in this directory carry it. It's a voluntary, paid program more common among larger multi-service companies than single-crew route operators, so its absence isn't treated as a red flag the way it might be for a licensed trade like electrical or plumbing work. New York doesn't require a specific occupational license for residential window washing the way it does for those trades, so BBB status, Google Business Profile verification, and NY State entity registration do the verification work a license would otherwise do.

Review recency (w6) comes with an honest caveat: because window cleaning here runs on spring and fall route windows with almost no exterior work between December and February, review timestamps cluster hard in April–June and September–November. Our current data source doesn't expose a per-review date for most listings, so this factor returns a neutral 0 for the majority of businesses today rather than a true freshness signal — one of the honest limits of building this from public review platforms instead of a paid review-monitoring feed.

Service-area overlap (w7) carries real weight — 15% — because window cleaning in Monroe County runs on fixed routes, not on-demand dispatch: Pittsford is a Tuesday route, Penfield a Wednesday route, Fairport and Perinton share Thursday. A business that lists all ten target suburbs on paper but only actually routes through three of them scores lower than one whose listed coverage matches its real route.

Worked example

Three real listings from this directory, showing how the factors interact. Scores below are computed against the published formula for illustration — the live site computes the exact figure at request time from current data, so the number on a business's own page may shift slightly as reviews and service areas change.

Metropolitan's perfect 5.0 average is real — it's also built on a single review, so the log-scaled volume term barely credits it. Fish Window Cleaning's BBB accreditation and higher review count nearly close the gap with Penfield Window Cleaning's larger, longer-running review base despite a lower star average and less suburb overlap. No single factor decides the outcome — that's the point of a seven-factor composite instead of a single number.

Data sources

• Google Business Profile — primary source for review count + average stars + listed service area
• Yelp — secondary review signal; typically thinner for route-based home-service trades than for restaurants
• BBB.org — accreditation status + complaint history (public records only)
• NY State business registry — verifies legal entity name + active status, since window cleaning has no state occupational license to check against
• Business's own website — for service offerings + pricing where published

We update business data weekly. If you see something stale, email connormeador@gmail.com.

What we DON'T do

• Pay-for-placement — no business pays to rank higher
• Reciprocal-link schemes — no "link to us, we'll link to you"
• Scraped review text — we link to original sources, we don't republish
• Fabricated certifications — only verifiable industry credentials are mentioned
• AI-generated "sample of their work" images tied to specific businesses
• Treat a single seasonal review spike as a sustained-quality signal — that's exactly what the volume + recency balance in the formula is built to prevent