A star rating is a plain average: every review counts the same. The R Score weights reviews before averaging them. How detailed a review is, who left it, and when it was left change how much it counts. What it says sets its value.
Illustrative examples, not real businesses.
Rviewo is new. Almost no business has been reviewed through it yet, so almost every score you see is built mostly from that business's public Google record and is labeled provisional. That is not a hedge, it is the honest state of the data. Scores get sharper with every review collected through Rviewo, and stop being provisional at 5.
The idea
Every review answers two questions. How good was the experience, and how much should this particular review count? A plain average answers only the first: it adds the values up and divides. The R Score answers both.
The value is how positive the experience was, on a 0 to 100 scale. That is what the review says. The weight is how much it should move the score, and it comes from how detailed the review is, who left it, and how long ago.
Weight
How detailed the review is and how much the reviewer is trusted set a weight between 0.2 and 2. Age then reduces that weight as the review gets older.
Detail is graded on how specific the review is, never on whether it is positive. A detailed complaint grades higher than a vague compliment.
Trust comes from who left it: whether we can identify the account, whether the reviewer has a history, and whether their device placed them at the business when they wrote it. Most reviews carry no location at all, and those are not penalized for it. Reviews flagged as inauthentic are excluded entirely rather than down-weighted.
Recency
A review from today counts about 3 times as much as a years-old one. The decay is smooth rather than stepped, and it stops at a floor instead of reaching zero, because an old review is still evidence of something.
Worked example
Both have the same Google rating, 4.7 from 200 ratings, and both have 45 Rviewo reviews. A star average cannot tell them apart. Everything that separates them is how detailed those reviews are, how recent, and whether the person who left one could be identified.
Harbor Grill
4.7 on Google from 200, plus 45 Rviewo reviews
86R Score
Detailed reviews, most from the last few months, most from identifiable customers, about half from devices that placed them at the restaurant.
Maple Street Diner
4.7 on Google from 200, plus 45 Rviewo reviews
58R Score
The same number of reviews, but one-liners, more than a year old, and none from an identifiable customer.
Harbor Grill's reviews are recent, detailed and mostly from identifiable customers, so they carry close to full weight and pull the score above what the Google record alone would give. Maple Street's are one-liners from more than a year ago with nobody identifiable behind them, so each one counts for a fraction as much and the score settles lower.
Both businesses are invented for this illustration. Their scores are produced by running the real scoring model over those invented reviews.
Provisional scores
With no Rviewo reviews, a score is derived from the business's public Google rating and review count. The rating is first pulled toward a typical rating, so a handful of ratings cannot produce a confident-looking number, then mapped onto the 0 to 100 scale.
From the first Rviewo review onward it is a blend, and our share of it grows as more arrive. Around 20 reviews the two sources carry roughly equal weight.
| Rviewo reviews | From Rviewo | From Google |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 5% | 95% |
| 5 | 20% | 80% |
| 10 | 33% | 67% |
| 20 | 50% | 50% |
| 50 | 70% | 30% |
| 100 | 70% | 30% |
The Rviewo share is capped at 70%. At least 30% of every score always comes from the public Google record, however many reviews we collect.
Ratings and review counts sourced from Google. Rviewo is not affiliated with Google.
Limits
Businesses cannot remove a review they dislike. Keeping feedback private does not remove it from the score, so steering unhappy customers to a private channel cannot raise a score.
FAQ
Every eligible review gets a value and a weight. The value is how positive the experience was, on a 0 to 100 scale. How detailed the review is and how much the reviewer is trusted set a weight between 0.2 and 2; age then reduces that weight as the review gets older. The R Score is the weighted average of the values, not a plain mean.
A Google rating is an average: every review counts the same, whatever it says and whenever it was left. The R Score weights reviews first, so two businesses can share a star average and score differently.
Almost every score on Rviewo today is provisional, because almost no business has been reviewed through Rviewo yet. A provisional score leans on the business’s public Google record. It stops being provisional at 5 Rviewo reviews, and it gets sharper with every one before that.
No. Even with no Rviewo reviews at all it is derived from the Google rating and review count rather than copied from them: the rating is pulled toward a typical rating until there is enough of a record to stand on, then mapped onto the 0 to 100 scale. From the first Rviewo review onward it is a blend as well.
No. The Rviewo share is capped at 70%, so at least 30% of the score always comes from the public Google record. It stays in as a check on our own data.
No. A business cannot buy, edit or remove reviews. It may offer a reward for completing feedback, but the reward never depends on what the customer says, and reviews left with a reward attached are labeled as such.
Several things, and none of them is a guarantee. Reviews flagged as inauthentic are excluded from the score entirely. One account or email address can publish one review of a business every 30 days, and feedback left inside that window reaches the owner privately without counting. A review from someone we cannot identify counts for less than one from a verified customer. The weight any single review can carry is capped at 2, so no single review can count for more than twice an average one. And at least 30% of the score always comes from the public Google record, which comes from Google, not from Rviewo.
Yes. Weight halves every 120 days down to a floor, so a review left today counts about 3 times as much as a years-old one. It never falls to zero, because an old review is still evidence.
Yes, at full weight. Choosing to keep feedback private changes who reads it, not whether it counts. Keeping feedback private does not remove it from the score, so steering unhappy customers to a private channel cannot raise a score.
When a reviewer’s device shares its location, we check whether they were at the business, and reviews from customers who were there count more. Most reviews carry no location at all, and those are not penalized for it.
Scores sit in one of 5 equal bands, the same bands for every business. What changes by industry is only what each band is called, because the words that suit a restaurant do not suit a tire shop.
When there is too little evidence to place a business in a band, the score is still shown but the band name is replaced with “Too few reviews to rate”. Naming a band needs at least 5 pieces of evidence between Rviewo reviews and the Google record.
Every number on this page, including the example scores, is produced by the scoring model itself (version 2), so it cannot drift from how scores are actually calculated.