How the Proof Score works

We start from the Google Maps business listings filed under water damage restoration and fire damage restoration in each area, then read the website each listing links to. A company is scored when its own pages say it does water damage, mold, or fire restoration work and at least 5 of the 14 website items below check out. Carpet cleaners, plumbers, and roofers who don't describe restoration work aren't scored, and neither are listings whose names use look-alike letters from other alphabets, a common map-spam pattern.

A major-city list covers companies with an office inside a fixed radius of downtown: 34 miles for Austin, 25 miles for Houston, 19 miles for Dallas, 16 miles for Fort Worth, 22 miles for San Antonio. A nearby-city list, such as Round Rock, covers companies with an office in that city plus companies within 25 miles that name the city as a service area. Each list shows a company once, even when it has several listings, websites, or offices under one phone number.

The mold remediation and fire damage lists use the same scores and keep only the companies whose websites document that work.

We read up to 8 pages of each company's website: the home page, then the pages about services, service areas, process, insurance, the company, and privacy. Our crawler identifies itself, follows each site's robots.txt, and waits between requests.

Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, reads the text of those pages and points to a quote for each item. Our code then checks that the quote appears word for word on the pages. An item scores only when its quote matches, and every profile shows the quote and the page it came from. These items are self-reported, because a website can say anything.

Texas Comptroller match

We search the Comptroller's Active Franchise Tax Permit Holders file on data.texas.gov for an exact name match, after dropping endings such as LLC and Inc. We try the legal name a company's website gives, the name its website uses, and the name on its map listing. When the same name belongs to taxpayers in more than one city, we keep the one in the company's own city and record no match if none is there. The entity's age comes from the Secretary of State charter date in the same file.

Sole proprietors, companies operating under an assumed name, and entities registered under a different legal name may not match. A miss scores zero for that item and says nothing about the work. For a franchise location, a match to the network's own entity doesn't count, because it isn't the business that runs that location.

Domain age, email, and HTTPS

The domain's registration date comes from public RDAP records. A franchise location on its network's shared website gets no domain-age points, since that age belongs to the network. The email check looks for an MX record in DNS, and the HTTPS check records whether the website loaded over a secure connection.

We don't use star ratings, review counts, Better Business Bureau grades, or badges from lead-generation sites, because we can't check where they came from. We don't sell placement, and no company can pay to be listed, removed, or moved.

Credentials aren't in this version of the score. An IICRC Certified Firm listing, a TDLR mold remediation license, and an EPA Lead-Safe firm certification all live in lookups we can't query automatically yet. A company that names IICRC on its website earns the smaller self-reported item for naming an industry standard. Our guide to checking a restoration company shows how to look each credential up yourself.

Lists are sorted by Proof Score, then by points from public records, then by name. Weights are fixed for each version of the method. A missing item scores zero, and its points never move to another item.

We rebuilt every list on October 19, 2026. A company that finds a mistake can send a correction with a link to the source, and we re-run its checks.