How we rank termite companies
Started 27 September 2026 as a pilot in the Tampa, FL metro, now live across every Florida metro on this site. A number built only from facts we can point to: a licence-register match, a phrase from the company's own website (with the source page and the date we checked), and Google's own rating figures, kept separate and clearly labelled.
What it is not
- Not a certification or an endorsement. It does not mean a higher-scoring company does better work, only that more of what we can verify is stated somewhere we can check.
- Not for sale. No business can raise its score or its position on any page by paying pestlist. There is no paid placement product on this site today; if one is ever built, it will never touch this score.
- Not independent verification beyond the licence match. A company can state something on its website that turns out not to be true; always confirm anything that matters to you with a phone call.
The 100 points
| Group | Points | What earns them |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | 20 | A state licence matched to this specific business, active, checked against the register. 20 if matched and current, 0 if not. |
| Years licensed | 10 | From the licence's first-issued date. 15+ years: 10. 10 to 14: 8. 5 to 9: 6. 2 to 4: 3. Under 2 or unknown: 0. Florida's register appears to begin in 1986/87 (see below); a licence first issued then still lands in the 15+ band, tied with every other long-licensed company. |
| Termite service breadth | 20 | 4 points for each distinct verified service, up to 5, from: liquid treatment, bait system, tenting/fumigation, spot treatment, heat or orange-oil treatment, WDO/real-estate inspection. Only from a page specific to this branch or company, not a chain's generic company-wide page (see below). |
| Guarantees | 15 | Warranty or bond stated: 10. Free inspection stated: 5. Same branch-specific rule as service breadth. |
| Availability | 15 | Same-day service stated: 7. Stated service area covers this metro's core city: 8. Same branch-specific rule as service breadth. |
| Transparency | 10 | A published price for a termite-related service: 5. Phone and website both listed: 5. |
| Credentials | 5 | QualityPro, NPMA or FPMA membership stated: 5. |
| Google rating and reviews | 5 | Review count: 100+: 3, 20 to 99: 2, under 20: 0. Rating: 4.5+: 2, 4.0 to 4.49: 1, below 4.0 or none: 0. Third-party, capped at 5 of 100 on purpose. |
"Not stated on their website" is not "no"
A fact is recorded only when a company's own website states it. If a company simply doesn't mention free inspections, that criterion scores 0 for them and their page shows "Not stated on their website", exactly as it would if they didn't offer one. We are not claiming the company lacks the thing, only that we found no statement of it. The same rule applies to the licence and rating groups: no matched licence scores 0 and shows "No licence match found on the state register", never "unlicensed".
Only this branch's own page counts
A fact only earns service-breadth, guarantee or availability points when it comes from a page specific to this branch or, for a single-location business, the company's own site. A chain's generic, not-this-location page (a national "/services/" page next to that same branch's own "/locations/.../tampa-pest-control/" page, say) is shown on the provider page, labelled "Company-wide", but doesn't count toward the score: it describes the company, not this specific listing.
Florida's 1986/87 register floor
FDACS's earliest licence records cluster in 1986 and 1987, then drop back to a normal yearly count from 1988 on, which looks like when the state's own digital register begins rather than when those businesses actually started. A licence first issued in that window shows as "Licensed since at least" that year, rather than a specific first-issued date, and still lands in the top years-licensed band (15+ years), tied with every other long-licensed company rather than being read as older or newer than the rest.
Tie-breakers
- Higher total score.
- Higher Google review count.
- Alphabetical by business name.
How often this is rechecked
- The licence group, whenever the state licence export we use is refreshed.
- The website-fact group, roughly every 6 months, or immediately when a business corrects its listing through our submission form.
- The Google rating group, on the site's existing data refresh.
Changing the weights or point values themselves is a method revision, not a routine update, and is recorded with a dated note when it happens.
Where the underlying facts come from
See our methodology page for how listings are matched to state licence registers. The website facts behind this score are gathered by fetching each company's own homepage and a few likely internal pages (services, about, service area, warranty or pricing, contact), politely and only where the site's own robots.txt allows it. Every fact kept for scoring has a source URL and a checked date, shown on the company's own page.