How we score Austin landscapers

Austin Landscapers currently scores 265 landscaping businesses across the metro area, from small crews doing weekly mowing routes to full design-build outfits handling patios and irrigation. Every business gets the same composite score out of 100, built from five measured signals. This page explains what goes into that score, why it's weighted the way it is, and where the limits are.

The five signals, heaviest first

Each business is scored on a 0-100 scale using a weighted blend of the following:

• Sentiment, 28%. A synthesis of what recent reviews actually say: recurring praise, recurring complaints, and how the two balance out. This is the largest single factor, and deliberately so (more on why below).
• Rating, 26%. The business's aggregate star rating on Google. A strong signal, but a blunt one on its own.
• Volume, 20%. How many reviews a business has, log-scaled so that a company with 400 reviews doesn't automatically dwarf one with 40 just because of raw count, while still rewarding businesses with a real track record over ones with a handful of reviews from friends and family.
• Recency, 12%. How recently customers have actually reviewed the business. A landscaper that was excellent in 2019 and hasn't been reviewed since tells you less than one with a steady stream of reviews this year.
• Completeness, 14%. Whether basic contact information is actually listed and current: phone number, website, hours, and address. Simple, but it correlates with a business that's easy to actually hire.

Why sentiment carries the most weight

Two landscaping companies can sit at the same 4.3-star average and mean very different things. One might have consistent, minor gripes about scheduling. The other might have a repeated pattern of complaints about a specific problem, like crews damaging sprinkler lines or no-shows on installation day, buried under a pile of five-star reviews for routine mowing. The star average hides that pattern. Reading what recent reviews actually describe is the only way to catch it, which is why sentiment is weighted above the raw star rating itself. We synthesize themes from recent reviews rather than republishing them, and every listing links out to the source on Google so you can read the original reviews yourself.

Confidence and low-review businesses

A business with only a few recent reviews cannot support a reliable score, no matter how good those reviews are. When the review count or recency is too thin to be confident, the listing is labelled low-confidence so you know to weigh it accordingly, rather than treating a small sample as settled fact.

What does not affect the score

Rankings are earned strictly from this rubric applied to public review data. Nothing else moves a score. Where paid placement exists on this site, it is always clearly labelled as such and has zero effect on where a business ranks or what score it carries. If you're comparing options, our best landscape design picks pulls from the same scoring, not a separate paid list.

Who's behind this

Austin Landscapers is published by Bluebonnet Local Guides. The rankings are maintained by Rachel Delgado, Managing Editor, who spent nine years estimating jobs and running crews for a landscaping company in Round Rock before moving into publishing. That background shapes the rubric: it's built to surface the kind of patterns (missed callbacks, sloppy cleanup, gear left behind) that someone who's actually run a crew knows to look for. Rankings here can't be bought, by Rachel or anyone else.

Data is refreshed monthly across all 265 businesses, and each individual listing carries a "last verified" stamp so you can see exactly when it was last checked rather than assuming the whole site is static.

Questions about a score, a correction request, or anything else about the methodology can go to hello@bluebonnetlocalguides.com. You can also start from the home page to browse the full directory.