How we rank recommendations
Your plan puts improvements in an order. This page explains what decides that order, and why a company paying us cannot change it. If you only read one thing: the ranking is finished and written down before we look at whether anyone will pay us for it.
The order things happen in
This sequence is the whole answer, and it is enforced in the software rather than promised in a policy:
- You answer questions about your home. We work out what each improvement would do for that specific property, using sourced figures.
- Each improvement is scored and ranked, and the result is recorded against the version of the figures that produced it. That is why we can still explain your plan months later.
- Only then does anything commercial run. It asks one question: for the improvements already ranked near the top, is there a company we can point you to?
The ranking step has no knowledge of which improvements carry a paid link. By the time that is known, the ranking is already finished and stored, and it is not offered a chance to reconsider.
What actually decides the order
The bigger inputs are how much a measure is likely to save in your home, how confident we are in the answer, and whether it makes sense to do it before or after something else.
That last one matters more than people expect. Improvements are sequenced fabric first, then controls, then how you make heat, then generation and storage — because insulating a house changes how much heat it needs, and sizing a heat pump for an uninsulated home means buying a bigger one than you will need. Each measure is recalculated against the demand that remains after the ones above it, which is also why the measures in your plan do not simply add up to the total.
Confidence is about how well we know your home — whether you gave us meter readings, whether you knew your wall type — and not about how variable the measure is. A result we are unsure about cannot be ranked first while a better-evidenced one is available.
What we will not sell
- Position in your results. No company can pay to appear higher, or to appear at all against a measure we did not recommend.
- A “featured” or “preferred” slot, under any name.
- An offer against something we told you is not worth doing, or that you are not eligible for.
If your assessment concludes nothing is worth doing, you will see no offers at all. That is the outcome that earns us nothing, and it is the one we most want you to be able to trust.
Where you will see a paid link
Only against an improvement your assessment already put near the top of your own list, and always labelled as an ad next to the link itself rather than in a footer. A paid link is an answer to “what do I do next?” It is never part of the answer to “what should I do?”
We also show one company per improvement rather than a panel of them. A row of competing installers under a recommendation makes it a marketplace, and we would rather it stayed a recommendation.
Checking us on it
Every plan comes with a “how we calculated this” panel showing the figures and sources behind it. If a commercial relationship were moving things up the list, that panel would not add up — the workings are the same ones the ranking used.